Tectonic City

<v Speaker 1>Okay, here we go. Okay, welcome to the crime page.
<v Speaker 1>But Bodany doesn't podcast. I'm here with Professor Cody Lazar,
<v Speaker 1>who is a professor of geology at California State University
<v Speaker 1>at Santa Barbara. Did I get that right? Or did
<v Speaker 1>I mess? I messed something up? I know I did.
<v Speaker 2>It's Sam Bernardino.
<v Speaker 1>Oh, Sam Bernardino right, Santa Barbara said, you know, it's
<v Speaker 1>been so long since I lived in California, I always
<v Speaker 1>confused it to definitely Commando.
<v Speaker 2>San Burdu.
<v Speaker 1>Sam Burdeu's got a better flavor to it than Santa Barbara.
<v Speaker 1>Santa Barbara's like the kind of place I'd get yelled
<v Speaker 1>at for just, you know, walking down the street with
<v Speaker 1>a dog off leaders. Okay, anyway from San Burdu. So, uh, Cody,
<v Speaker 1>I've been following you for uh been following you on
<v Speaker 1>social media for like two or three years. Your your
<v Speaker 1>Instagram page Tectonic City is fucking hilarious. And yeah, I
<v Speaker 1>mean I just especially you're based out of southern California,
<v Speaker 1>that's such a great spot for geology because as you
<v Speaker 1>start going east from away from Los Angeles County, you're
<v Speaker 1>just you're it's just naked geology all around. It's the desert,
<v Speaker 1>so there's not a lot of not a lot of
<v Speaker 1>that pesky plant life that I'm obsessed with covering the
<v Speaker 1>rocks up. So and you're in a state with just
<v Speaker 1>I mean, some of the most diverse geology in the
<v Speaker 1>lower forty eight. So, uh, thanks for coming on the podcast.
<v Speaker 1>And I guess I don't know where where should we start?
<v Speaker 2>Where do you?
<v Speaker 1>Where do you want to start at?
<v Speaker 2>Wherever you want to go? It's it's Saturday in the day,
<v Speaker 2>is young?
<v Speaker 1>Okay? Man? Well, I guess I want this. Yeah, I
<v Speaker 1>wanted I want the conversation to just be some that
<v Speaker 1>the lay people can can get get something out of you,
<v Speaker 1>like I didn't know that. I didn't uh, you know whatever.
<v Speaker 1>Some I want to cover all the interesting topics. But
<v Speaker 1>first off, I want to I want to say when
<v Speaker 1>I learned with the geologic timescale, was I kind of was?
<v Speaker 1>I got angry almost at how I hadn't been taught
<v Speaker 1>this before, Like why was I just learned earning this
<v Speaker 1>and in like a community college course I decided to
<v Speaker 1>take when I got a wild hair up my ass
<v Speaker 1>and just wanted to because I went to school. I
<v Speaker 1>just wanted to learn about geology. I don't want to
<v Speaker 1>get a degree. I was just like I saw these
<v Speaker 1>cool rocks when I was travel around the country. I
<v Speaker 1>want to know how to form Do you think, uh,
<v Speaker 1>do you think geologic timescale and and you know, play
<v Speaker 1>tectonics should be taught in great school? Doesn't that sound
<v Speaker 1>like a good idea?
<v Speaker 2>I mean it, it is a good idea, and they
<v Speaker 2>get it. Like, you know, I've got three kids, and
<v Speaker 2>every once in a while, look come to me and
<v Speaker 2>they'll say they learned something about geology, and it's this
<v Speaker 2>sort of top piece meal here and there, and uh,
<v Speaker 2>there's never like a you know, like a major. Well
<v Speaker 2>I don't want to use the word major. That sounds
<v Speaker 2>like college. There's never like a significant union on geology, right,
<v Speaker 2>It's just sort of like, yeah, here's a volcanic rock,
<v Speaker 2>and maybe they'll do like a little exercise on the
<v Speaker 2>three rock types igneus, metamorphic, and sedimentary where they'll play
<v Speaker 2>with plato or something. But that that's about it. So
<v Speaker 2>it's not it's not a big not a huge topic,
<v Speaker 2>but which is unfortunate because kids love rocks and minerals, right,
<v Speaker 2>they you know, like you know, There's there's two ages
<v Speaker 2>where when most people get into rocks, they're either seven
<v Speaker 2>years old or there's seventy. Right, there's like old guys
<v Speaker 2>in the desert, they're retired or their kids and they
<v Speaker 2>pick up a rock and they and they love it.
<v Speaker 2>So those are those are two of our geologies pig
<v Speaker 2>fan bases, and so yeah, I think they should get
<v Speaker 2>a little bit more. Uh, you know, geology in school
<v Speaker 2>for sure. You know, geology has long suffered from being
<v Speaker 2>sort of like the little sister of all the sciences.
<v Speaker 2>There's there's no Nobel Prize for geology, right, they have
<v Speaker 2>chemistry and physics Nobel Prizes. There's a Nobel Prize for medicine,
<v Speaker 2>which basically covers biology. And of course we revere doctors
<v Speaker 2>and and uh and the medical profession and most of
<v Speaker 2>those people will major in biology. But geology is kind
<v Speaker 2>of sort of tucked away a little bit. And uh,
<v Speaker 2>that's a little a little unfortunate. You know, I have
<v Speaker 2>mixed feelings about it. I mean, let's give the physicists
<v Speaker 2>they're due, right, I mean, these are amazing scientists and
<v Speaker 2>they do great stuff. But I think you're right, I
<v Speaker 2>think we should have a little more geology.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, I think what to me, what's most fascinating
<v Speaker 1>about it is that it's I mean, yeah, you know,
<v Speaker 1>for a career path, it's like, what do you do
<v Speaker 1>if your geologist? You can go work for an oil company? Maybe,
<v Speaker 1>I mean that's like the old that's kind of such
<v Speaker 1>a cliche. But just having an innate fascination with with
<v Speaker 1>the skin of the earth is I mean, just knowledge
<v Speaker 1>for knowledge's sake. Just to know how things formed, to
<v Speaker 1>know how the ground beneath you formed is fascinating. I
<v Speaker 1>always call plants the living skin of the earth, but man,
<v Speaker 1>you know, plants are the living skin of the earth.
<v Speaker 1>But the actual skin of the earth is all all
<v Speaker 1>the rocks, I mean, And it blows my mind how
<v Speaker 1>many people just don't even know like the three basic
<v Speaker 1>rock types. And it's fascinating shit to learn about too.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, it is. And you know, it's funny you
<v Speaker 2>mentioned plants, because you know, if people are into hiking
<v Speaker 2>and nature, you know, you go out and you're surrounded
<v Speaker 2>by rocks and plants, as you say, and you know,
<v Speaker 2>maybe you'll see like a marmot or a squirrel or
<v Speaker 2>something everywhere, a bird, you know, But what's always there
<v Speaker 2>and what can't run away from you is plants and rocks.
<v Speaker 2>And so if you're into nature, why wouldn't you want
<v Speaker 2>to learn more about plants and rocks Because they're really
<v Speaker 2>easy to observe and they're easy to see. And and
<v Speaker 2>as you say, like, once you start learning, you know,
<v Speaker 2>the geology is everywhere, right, So you know, we're lucky
<v Speaker 2>in California, we've got amazing geology. But you know, I
<v Speaker 2>grew up in Florida, and you know, you wouldn't think
<v Speaker 2>Florida has geology, but I promise you around every corner
<v Speaker 2>there's something geological, right, even the whole state, Like it's
<v Speaker 2>it's mostly flat, but there's a reason it's flat, right.
<v Speaker 2>And so if you understand geology, you can, you know,
<v Speaker 2>the whole world of observations opens up to you and
<v Speaker 2>you can really appreciate your surroundings in a in a
<v Speaker 2>new fundamental way that that makes that makes you know,
<v Speaker 2>hiking and backpacking and camping or just or just going
<v Speaker 2>on a you know, walking the woods that much more interesting,
<v Speaker 2>just like the plants totally.
<v Speaker 1>And I think well especially though too, I mean, like
<v Speaker 1>the fucking time that's implied, like the massive amounts of
<v Speaker 1>time that dwarfs a human life span and further dwarfs
<v Speaker 1>all of human civilization, not to mention our existence as
<v Speaker 1>a species, which is what like two million years we've
<v Speaker 1>been more or less you know, in this model of
<v Speaker 1>primate right. I mean that, like that's what really did
<v Speaker 1>it for me. When I learned about the geologic timescale.
<v Speaker 1>I'm like, God, man, you know, you could give or
<v Speaker 1>take religion whatever I'm not not. I mean, you know,
<v Speaker 1>I've got my own sense of spirituality. I don't care
<v Speaker 1>if someone's religious as long as they don't talk to
<v Speaker 1>me about it. But but in terms of like an
<v Speaker 1>actual origin story, this stuff is. I mean, you know
<v Speaker 1>what I learned this. I was like, man, this is
<v Speaker 1>this is the real origin story. This is how life evolved,
<v Speaker 1>and how the rocks beneath someone's feet evolved, and how
<v Speaker 1>mountains are made, you know, like that kind of thing.
<v Speaker 1>Like it's it's just such a yeah, it's all around you.
<v Speaker 1>It's it's part of the phys cool world. I found
<v Speaker 1>it so fucking wild to think about. I mean, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>what do you take from that? Like there's so many
<v Speaker 1>people that don't understand that, Like, mountains are the product
<v Speaker 1>of earthquakes, you.
<v Speaker 2>Know, right, right, and you know, I wish you know, well,
<v Speaker 2>you know, some people take classes in college, of course,
<v Speaker 2>and they learn a little bit and you know, so
<v Speaker 2>there's a little bit of education that goes on. But
<v Speaker 2>most of those people, I mean, let's be honest, they're
<v Speaker 2>taking geology in college because they want to get their
<v Speaker 2>science credit with something that doesn't have a lot of masks.
<v Speaker 2>So and that is true. So so how much do
<v Speaker 2>they retain I don't know. Usually people, It's like with
<v Speaker 2>anything in education, you know, the people to get the
<v Speaker 2>most out are the ones that want to know it.
<v Speaker 2>And you know, maybe we need to do a better
<v Speaker 2>job of explain of motivating people for why they might
<v Speaker 2>want to know about, you know, how a mountain informed.
<v Speaker 2>They think that the mountains are pretty, of course, because
<v Speaker 2>they go on Instagram with their sun dresses and take
<v Speaker 2>fiction in front of them, and so like, can we
<v Speaker 2>take a step further and be like, how did that?
<v Speaker 2>Why is it so pretty in this? Like, ah, it
<v Speaker 2>was carved by glaciers out of carbonate rocks during the
<v Speaker 2>last ice Age, and you know, isn't that interesting? You know?
<v Speaker 1>So yeah, you know, I want to think people because
<v Speaker 1>I'm everywhere I go, I'm just looking at the world
<v Speaker 1>and I'm like, man, what the fuck? Like how like,
<v Speaker 1>what is this? It's so cool? And I want to
<v Speaker 1>think like a lot of people are doing that too.
<v Speaker 1>But I mean, when I actually think about it, I
<v Speaker 1>realized a lot probably aren't, like you know, they're probably
<v Speaker 1>thinking about whatever minutia in people's personal life. But but
<v Speaker 1>I think.
<v Speaker 2>Well, I mean, let's you know, people that do have
<v Speaker 2>different interests. I want to sort of hold space for that. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>there's a lot of things that I'm not interested in
<v Speaker 2>that other people are really like, For example, you know,
<v Speaker 2>you know, video games, Like I don't play video games,
<v Speaker 2>and there are people that spend their entire lives playing
<v Speaker 2>video games. Or ballet. I've tried to like ballet, but
<v Speaker 2>I just I'm just not like, Hey, it's Sunday, what
<v Speaker 2>do I want to do? I want to go to
<v Speaker 2>the Ballet's Ever in my mind, you know, I.
<v Speaker 1>Never thought about putting on his shoes and going to
<v Speaker 1>take a spinner on a hardwood.
<v Speaker 2>Floor side, right, it's not it's not it's not my bag, baby.
<v Speaker 1>But still but still, like I'm not into cars. I
<v Speaker 1>still want i'd be cool to know how a car works,
<v Speaker 1>you know, or I know that that's true fucking microwaivers,
<v Speaker 1>you know what I mean. But but anyway, but yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I'm not knocking people. I just I always just wish
<v Speaker 1>there's you know, I like the ponderers. I like, I
<v Speaker 1>like those people you meet who are you know, they've
<v Speaker 1>still got that element of like a really excited six
<v Speaker 1>year old in the backyard looking at roly polleys and
<v Speaker 1>rocks and shit. And my daughter is always picking up rocks.
<v Speaker 1>She's always like the stuff I find in her pockets
<v Speaker 1>when I'm doing laundry. Man, I'm like, man, what do
<v Speaker 1>you what you like worse than me? You know, It's
<v Speaker 1>like me, I've got seeds, she's got rocks.
<v Speaker 2>So you know, I'm I'm with you that I I
<v Speaker 2>enjoy being around the curious ponderers as well. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>that's much more. That's much more interesting to me than
<v Speaker 2>being around the consumers, so to speak. You know, I like,
<v Speaker 2>you know, producers of knowledge or you know, as opposed
<v Speaker 2>to somebody people that just sit around and yeah and consumed.
<v Speaker 2>I'm using the word consume in a generic term, but
<v Speaker 2>I know what you mean.
<v Speaker 1>Society produces it though, I think the society that you're in,
<v Speaker 1>the dominant society, kind of produces one or the other.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, it comes up Nashal, but you know it's
<v Speaker 1>it certainly accentuates and encourages one or the other sometimes.
<v Speaker 1>But but but anyway, I want to, Okay, straight to
<v Speaker 1>the chase. One of my favorite posts of yours recently was, uh,
<v Speaker 1>it's supposed to says United States presidential It's got an
<v Speaker 1>election map with the red and the blue states, and
<v Speaker 1>it says United States presidential election results. If an ancient
<v Speaker 1>mid continental rift reactivated to form New Seafloor, can we
<v Speaker 1>talk about this? Is that? Is that rift the one
<v Speaker 1>that was beneath New Madrid, Missouri that you were referring to.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, that's right. Yes, it's a little it's a little
<v Speaker 2>known fact. I mean, I'm sure people in the boot
<v Speaker 2>heel of Missouri in that area know all about it.
<v Speaker 2>But there is a a very dangerous seismic zone in
<v Speaker 2>southeastern Missouri along sort of the Misissippi River valley. In
<v Speaker 2>there it erupted. I don't have the details. Like back
<v Speaker 2>in the late nineteenth century it was a huge earthquake.
<v Speaker 2>I don't remember them. I'm going to say magnitude seven
<v Speaker 2>just for it could be even bigger.
<v Speaker 1>Norma, the river flowed the Mississippi River flowed backwards.
<v Speaker 2>For a while. Wow, amazing.
<v Speaker 1>Supposedly, supposedly that's how the lore goes. It was a
<v Speaker 1>big ripper, right, yeah, it was.
<v Speaker 2>It was in a Mark Twain piece or something.
<v Speaker 1>But but this is a big So, this is a
<v Speaker 1>big So to explain to everybody what is a what
<v Speaker 1>is a new rift center or what would a rift
<v Speaker 1>center be? Explained that because a lot of people don't
<v Speaker 1>even know.
<v Speaker 2>I'm plate right right, So okay, so big picture of
<v Speaker 2>the Earth. Most people know about that the Earth is
<v Speaker 2>divided into plates, some kind of plates that move around
<v Speaker 2>very slowly. You know, most people have at least heard
<v Speaker 2>of that, you know. As a side note, it's not
<v Speaker 2>like that was something we've quote known forever. That was
<v Speaker 2>a theory that was only developed fifty years ago. So
<v Speaker 2>this is all kind of fresh scientifically speaking. But you know,
<v Speaker 2>Earth just divided into plates. And the plate that we
<v Speaker 2>live on is very creatively called the North American plate.
<v Speaker 2>And back in the Cambrian period, which was let's just say,
<v Speaker 2>about six hundred million years ago, the North American plate
<v Speaker 2>tried to split in half and it failed. I don't
<v Speaker 2>I really, this is a little bit out of my league.
<v Speaker 2>We could get experts on this that could talk in
<v Speaker 2>depth about it, but the basic idea is that it
<v Speaker 2>tried to split into two and it somehow didn't for
<v Speaker 2>whatever reason. Then maybe there was another plate boundary that
<v Speaker 2>prevented it to the west or the east or whatever.
<v Speaker 2>But it left this scar, this area of weakness. And
<v Speaker 2>the word we use for the splitting of plates is
<v Speaker 2>called a rift. It's called a continental rift. And the
<v Speaker 2>word that geologists use to describe what's going on under
<v Speaker 2>New Madrid, Missouri, is we call it a failed rift.
<v Speaker 2>And it gets a very nerdy word called a lockagen
<v Speaker 2>if people want to look that up au la cog.
<v Speaker 2>And it just means that there was, you know, the
<v Speaker 2>plate tried to break, it didn't. It left behind the scar.
<v Speaker 2>And when I say scar physically, what that means is
<v Speaker 2>there's there's these old faults that are under the you know,
<v Speaker 2>in the subsurface underground beneath that region, and they get
<v Speaker 2>activated every now and then. And the reason they're activated
<v Speaker 2>is because far away from that area are is an
<v Speaker 2>actual plate boundary. Right, So the San Andreas Fault, which
<v Speaker 2>is you know, what's probably two thousand and maybe fifteen
<v Speaker 2>hundred miles to the west. You know, there's an active
<v Speaker 2>plate boundary, so the plates are still moving and churning,
<v Speaker 2>and sometimes there are forces from the edge of the
<v Speaker 2>plate that get propagated to the middle of the plate
<v Speaker 2>and are released by these horrific earthquakes in the middle
<v Speaker 2>of the country. And what makes us weird, by the way,
<v Speaker 2>is that, you know, one of the things you learn
<v Speaker 2>in geology is that most earthquakes and volcanoes and all
<v Speaker 2>these catastrophic geologic events, they occur along plate boundaries. And
<v Speaker 2>you know, which would be the west coast of America.
<v Speaker 2>That's where the edge of the of the North American
<v Speaker 2>plate is. But New Madrid is very very far from
<v Speaker 2>a plate boundary. In fact, it's like smack dab in
<v Speaker 2>the middle of the plate. So we would call it
<v Speaker 2>intraplate intraplate earthquakes, and and so it's just very unusual
<v Speaker 2>to have that, and there's not a lot of it.
<v Speaker 2>There's a so there's if you if you were to
<v Speaker 2>google earthquake hazard map of the United States, you'd get
<v Speaker 2>this map and there'd be a you know, big hot
<v Speaker 2>spots on the west coast where everybody knows the earthquakes are.
<v Speaker 2>But you'll see this big hot spot right in the
<v Speaker 2>middle of the country, right around New Madrid. And there's
<v Speaker 2>a couple other weird ones, like there's one in North Carolina.
<v Speaker 2>They had a horrible or squick there that's far from
<v Speaker 2>a plate boundary in Charleston, South Carolina. And again in
<v Speaker 2>the in the nineteen hundreds. I don't know what's going on.
<v Speaker 1>I think you're safe. You think you're safe living in
<v Speaker 1>a place like Missouri, But little do you know, you
<v Speaker 1>know right right.
<v Speaker 2>And you know, I mean the truth is earth little
<v Speaker 2>earthquakes happen all over the place, like even in Florida.
<v Speaker 2>There in the Florida Panhandle. I remember like ten years
<v Speaker 2>ago there was like a magnitude four earthquake, like some
<v Speaker 2>sad little clump of mud settled or something in the
<v Speaker 2>Gulf of Mexico and that propagated some some motion that
<v Speaker 2>caused a little bit of an earthquake that would just
<v Speaker 2>kind of feel like maybe a truck going by. But
<v Speaker 2>in New Madrid, I mean that will that'll take down
<v Speaker 2>a concrete block building.
<v Speaker 1>So what does so there's an old rift. It's crazy
<v Speaker 1>to think, I mean something that happened six or a
<v Speaker 1>million years ago. So a rift center like kind of
<v Speaker 1>analogous to a seafloor spreading center or yeah, a rift.
<v Speaker 1>So it's where new magmas coming up and you know,
<v Speaker 1>if you imagine it, like uh fuck, I don't know
<v Speaker 1>what's the best way. A conveyor belt where one belt
<v Speaker 1>goes to the west, one belt goes to the east,
<v Speaker 1>and that's new magma coming up and then it goes
<v Speaker 1>back down gets recycled at a subduction zone. That kind
<v Speaker 1>of it's like a rift is what's going on, you
<v Speaker 1>know between the Arabian plate and the African plate correct
<v Speaker 1>like the same same thing, but in the case of
<v Speaker 1>New Madrid, it got halted. Maybe the gears got jammed
<v Speaker 1>up down there in the mantle, who knows, but it
<v Speaker 1>didn't follow through. But it's still there. So you've got
<v Speaker 1>so it's like a zone of weakness. And so where
<v Speaker 1>is the movement coming from that's causing it. It's coming
<v Speaker 1>from the outside like far away basically right, but it's pushing.
<v Speaker 2>That's what I think. I mean, I think that the
<v Speaker 2>what what causes the earthquakes is like large scale tectonic
<v Speaker 2>motions of the entire plate, and somehow that that. You know,
<v Speaker 2>you're going to build up tension in a plate through
<v Speaker 2>tectonic activity, and it's going to be released in earthquakes.
<v Speaker 2>Usually that tension is released on the boundaries, but every
<v Speaker 2>once in a while for physics reasons that I don't
<v Speaker 2>think I could explain very well. You know, there's some
<v Speaker 2>static forces that get released in the inside of the plate,
<v Speaker 2>and so that's basically what's happening.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's man, it's wild. You know. That's the place
<v Speaker 1>I always say, that's the real map that matters, is
<v Speaker 1>the tectonic map, you know, because when you look at that,
<v Speaker 1>you're like, oh, I get it. I get why South
<v Speaker 1>America fits so perfectly into that little nook of Africa,
<v Speaker 1>you know. And then I didn't know this. Did you
<v Speaker 1>know that? I didn't know this. You probably knew this
<v Speaker 1>even though you're on the west coast. But Africa, you know,
<v Speaker 1>rammed into North America back in the day. Africa and Scotland,
<v Speaker 1>right or I guess Spain, like western Europe and northwestern
<v Speaker 1>Africa rammed into the eastern coast of North America. That's
<v Speaker 1>what caused the eurogyeny of the Appalachian mountains, and then
<v Speaker 1>they later spread apart. Again is that correct? Or am
<v Speaker 1>I messing that up?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah? That's that's that's basically the story. Yeah, we had
<v Speaker 2>the Appalachian orogeny, and there's all these there's the Akkadians.
<v Speaker 2>So the word orogeny is, first of all, it's a joke.
<v Speaker 2>It sounds like orogenos.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, we're not saying not e R O G. This
<v Speaker 1>is not a filthy I'm not there yet. You know,
<v Speaker 1>maybe one day I'll get faith to read adult novels,
<v Speaker 1>but not now.
<v Speaker 2>This is orogen is O R O, not R. But
<v Speaker 2>the word orogeny is just nerds speak for a mountain
<v Speaker 2>building episode. And so there there are all these you know,
<v Speaker 2>these old mountains on the East coast that that resulted
<v Speaker 2>from a continental collision a long long time ago. And uh,
<v Speaker 2>and there were several of these events that happened. And
<v Speaker 2>then later on, uh, they the plate. So they came
<v Speaker 2>together to form a big plate, a giant super plate
<v Speaker 2>that we call Pangaea, perhaps you've heard of. And then
<v Speaker 2>at some point a continental rift formed, just like what
<v Speaker 2>Earth tried to do in New Madrid. But this one
<v Speaker 2>was successful and it split apart the plate of the
<v Speaker 2>Pangaea Plate into the all the plates that we have today,
<v Speaker 2>which would be the North American plates, South American plate
<v Speaker 2>on the west and then the Eurasian played African plates
<v Speaker 2>on the east. And so you know what's neat is
<v Speaker 2>that you can find the same rocks in Scotland that
<v Speaker 2>you can find and say, you know, Newfoundland or up
<v Speaker 2>in the you know, the Canadian the Canadian maritime provinces.
<v Speaker 2>The rocks are all the same, but they're separated by
<v Speaker 2>an ocean thanks to continental rifting.
<v Speaker 1>Right, So as with well Witchie together, well Witchie of fossils,
<v Speaker 1>there's well Witchy of fossils. You know that really, you know,
<v Speaker 1>well witchy a right weird Oh yeah, you know, the
<v Speaker 1>weirdest fucking plants. And there's well.
<v Speaker 2>Watched David Attenborough document right.
<v Speaker 1>Right, see today it's it's only alive and then Namibian
<v Speaker 1>fog deserts. But there's fossils from eastern Brazil because obviously
<v Speaker 1>they were a lot closer at one point. Yeah, it's
<v Speaker 1>why it's wild man, it's I remember reading a paper
<v Speaker 1>on it, I think last year, but.
<v Speaker 2>That this is this is sort of what's I think
<v Speaker 2>more interesting. Well, what's even more interesting about that to
<v Speaker 2>me is that you know, well, witchy grows in an
<v Speaker 2>arid climate, you know, which is you know, when you
<v Speaker 2>look at atmospheric circulation patterns, they tend to happen at
<v Speaker 2>thirty degrees latitudes sixty degrees latitude. And if the well
<v Speaker 2>witchi of fossils were in Brazil, then it would have
<v Speaker 2>been arid at that time. But there's a lot of
<v Speaker 2>continental motions. I thought that it would have been, you know,
<v Speaker 2>maybe more tropical or something, but maybe so somehow that
<v Speaker 2>arid climate was the same back then. So that's interesting.
<v Speaker 2>So that that's what's you know, play tectonics changes the
<v Speaker 2>climate of of whatever rock happens to be in a
<v Speaker 2>certain part of the globe, you know, like you can
<v Speaker 2>find tropical fossils and Antarctica. Yeah, because when they originally form.
<v Speaker 2>So I'm just I'm just sort of well, this little
<v Speaker 2>it's a brain tangent of mine.
<v Speaker 1>It's it's well, all this stuff's connected. Yeah, I mean
<v Speaker 1>bio biogeography I got into when I was realizing that
<v Speaker 1>certain lineages of plants were restricted to certain continents or
<v Speaker 1>certain hemispheres, and I was like, why is that? And
<v Speaker 1>then I started realizing it, Oh wow, it had a
<v Speaker 1>lot to do with plate tectonics and also with you know,
<v Speaker 1>how ocean currents shift according to where the continents are, like,
<v Speaker 1>you know, part of what helped as you know, part
<v Speaker 1>of what helped that Artica freeze over was when the
<v Speaker 1>continents moved further away from it and it got that
<v Speaker 1>circumpolar current that cut it off from the warmer ocean
<v Speaker 1>currents to the north, you know, from the equator. There's
<v Speaker 1>there's so much, Yeah, there's so much to think about here.
<v Speaker 1>And then I wonder too, I mean, I guess it's possible,
<v Speaker 1>well WICHI and maybe could have the one that's extant
<v Speaker 1>today could have evolved, you know, to survive in aridity.
<v Speaker 1>But probably yeah, probably not. I mean it was much
<v Speaker 1>more likely given the looking at the morphology of the
<v Speaker 1>fossils too that yeah, that part of Brazil was arid
<v Speaker 1>back then as well, which then makes you wonder what
<v Speaker 1>the hell like, why how did that happen? Like what
<v Speaker 1>was what were the ocean currents doing, you know, conveyor
<v Speaker 1>belts heat, what were the conton like? And then also
<v Speaker 1>what other weird shit was you know, alive at that
<v Speaker 1>time that we don't know about.
<v Speaker 2>Or is it maybe the well WITCHI was adapted to
<v Speaker 2>live in a different climate, and it's one of the
<v Speaker 2>most successfully adapted plants, at least the most able. You know,
<v Speaker 2>it's very able to change the climate that it's adapted to,
<v Speaker 2>you know what I mean. So maybe it was a
<v Speaker 2>different climate. I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's weird.
<v Speaker 2>That's a body question.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, Well, let's talk about before because I want to
<v Speaker 1>get to this. This is like my main jam here
<v Speaker 1>was let's talk about serpentine. Because you're in California. Serpentine's
<v Speaker 1>the state rock. Some you know, some nanny state do
<v Speaker 1>good or tried to change that in the nineties. Is
<v Speaker 1>that correct? They tried to like eradicate serpentine because they
<v Speaker 1>found out it has had asbestos in it.
<v Speaker 2>Is that I didn't know. I'm not sure what you're
<v Speaker 2>talking about. What I mean, let me rephrase that. I've
<v Speaker 2>never heard of who you're talking about trying to eradicate
<v Speaker 2>serpent team. But it is correct that it does form
<v Speaker 2>it does form asbestos. So ill Floyd.
<v Speaker 1>To retic right right, right? I mean, what do you
<v Speaker 1>mean by that, well, there was a thing. There was
<v Speaker 1>a uh this is a well known case. I wish
<v Speaker 1>I hadn't pulled up already. But there was some congressman
<v Speaker 1>who learned or some political uh state political representative who
<v Speaker 1>learned that the state rock of California had asbestos in
<v Speaker 1>it and was, you know, clutching their pearls about it.
<v Speaker 1>Was very offended that this, you know, this carcinogenic rock,
<v Speaker 1>you know, precursor to mesothelioma, uh, was the state rock
<v Speaker 1>and tried to change that, like tried to like denominate it.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I see, like in their in their minds, it
<v Speaker 2>would be the equivalent of having tobacco be the official
<v Speaker 2>state plant.
<v Speaker 1>Carolina, right, right right. And all these geologists got pissed
<v Speaker 1>up when I learned about serpentine. Uh. God. It must
<v Speaker 1>have been fifteen twenty years ago, and it was before
<v Speaker 1>I was even into plants. I remember the geology teacher
<v Speaker 1>telling me this. I had two geology teachers. One really
<v Speaker 1>sweet woman, spoke like she was on pills, was like
<v Speaker 1>a sleep at the wheel. You could tell she just
<v Speaker 1>had lost the she'd lost the feeling, she'd lost the chemistry,
<v Speaker 1>you know. But the other one was really spicy and salty,
<v Speaker 1>and you know the first day was like, I don't
<v Speaker 1>care if people think I'm a bitch. I just want
<v Speaker 1>you to learn this stuff. And she was a great
<v Speaker 1>fucking teacher. She was awesome, and she told us that story.
<v Speaker 1>She's like, they tried to change the state rock or
<v Speaker 1>someone did not they someone, you know, some state representatives
<v Speaker 1>tried to change the state rock and pissed off this
<v Speaker 1>whole swath of geologists and luckily it got struck down.
<v Speaker 1>But it's such a great rock to be the state
<v Speaker 1>rock because it's one of the largest. I mean, the
<v Speaker 1>serpentine exposures in California are huge. And then when I
<v Speaker 1>learned that they literally caused new plant species to evolve,
<v Speaker 1>that was. That was it. I mean I was in love,
<v Speaker 1>you know, that was And so then I started traveling.
<v Speaker 1>You know, I saw serpentine in New Caledonia, seen in
<v Speaker 1>the Dominican Republic on the East coast. It's not as
<v Speaker 1>impressive on the East coast, like a lot of things,
<v Speaker 1>no offense, but regardless, you know, I was teaching this,
<v Speaker 1>I teach in general Bonni this semester, just covering for
<v Speaker 1>somebody else, and I showed the students a serpentine presentation
<v Speaker 1>on serpentine endemism and plants and had to get into
<v Speaker 1>subduction zones to explain it and all that stuff. It's
<v Speaker 1>crazy that, you know, so many people don't know what
<v Speaker 1>this rock is because when you go to these landscapes.
<v Speaker 1>I know, you don't get too much in southern California,
<v Speaker 1>but when you go to these landscapes, they are otherworldly. Man,
<v Speaker 1>It's like being on the surface of Mars.
<v Speaker 2>I agree. And you know, for the record, they can
<v Speaker 2>cry our State rock out of my cold dead hands
<v Speaker 2>because serpentine is the shit. So you're talking to the
<v Speaker 2>right person, because that's probably my specialty. So I've almost
<v Speaker 2>every paper I published has been on serpentine.
<v Speaker 1>I had no idea, man. I love that we're turning
<v Speaker 1>this into like this paranoid conspiracy theory too of like
<v Speaker 1>this this you know, this non existent threat like this
<v Speaker 1>sound like angry boomers. H But but anyway, So, okay,
<v Speaker 1>I did not know serpentine was your main jam. So okay,
<v Speaker 1>tell me about serpentine. Tell everybody about serpentine.
<v Speaker 2>All right, Well, let's see. I'll start. I'll start with
<v Speaker 2>with the money shot, which is that a lot of
<v Speaker 2>people think serpentinites were the hosts of the origin of
<v Speaker 2>life itself, so which I can get in, We can
<v Speaker 2>unpeel those layers. It's been said. I think it was
<v Speaker 2>my my own PhD advisor, Craig Manning who said that serpententization,
<v Speaker 2>that's the process that makes serpentines, uh, is the most
<v Speaker 2>important reaction in the solar system. So it's it's it's
<v Speaker 2>a big deal. You know about it, Jesus, Oh yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>you know, it's it's good stuff. You know. The basic
<v Speaker 2>geology of a serpentinite. First of all, it's a metamorphic rock,
<v Speaker 2>which means that you take one rock and you change
<v Speaker 2>the conditions and it makes a new rock. So serpentinite
<v Speaker 2>is the name of the rock that contains the mineral serpentine.
<v Speaker 2>So I'll probably use the words serpentinite not to confuse
<v Speaker 2>the listeners or you or anybody about it. It just
<v Speaker 2>means that serpentine is a mineral, and rocks are made
<v Speaker 2>of minerals, and the rock made of serpentine is called
<v Speaker 2>a serpententite.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, perfect, perfect night and peridotite two. We got to
<v Speaker 1>talk about that later, but.
<v Speaker 2>Sorry, go on, Well, but that's that's an integral part
<v Speaker 2>of the story. So when you talk about a metamorphic rock,
<v Speaker 2>you want to know the rock that it formed from,
<v Speaker 2>and that rock is called the In general terms, every
<v Speaker 2>metamorphic rock has a proto lysth which is the rock
<v Speaker 2>that it formed from. Proto means early and lyft means rock.
<v Speaker 2>So it's just like the early rock what it was
<v Speaker 2>before it became a metamorphic rock. The protolysth or the
<v Speaker 2>rock before serpentinite is a peridotite, and those are rocks
<v Speaker 2>that are rich in the mineral olivine, and gem collectors
<v Speaker 2>know olivine as the gemstone pyridote, and olivine is a
<v Speaker 2>beautiful green mineral and it forms in you know, a
<v Speaker 2>variety of places, but the most commonplace where you get
<v Speaker 2>it on Earth is in the mantle. So Earth has
<v Speaker 2>these layers to it. Right, there's the crust, which is
<v Speaker 2>the outer thin layer, and then beneath the crust is
<v Speaker 2>this really thick layer called the mantle. And you know,
<v Speaker 2>we don't really get to go to the mantle because
<v Speaker 2>it's so deep. We can't it's hard to drill to it,
<v Speaker 2>like you have to even you know, the easiest way
<v Speaker 2>to drill is on the bottom of the ocean because
<v Speaker 2>that's where the crust is really thin. But you have
<v Speaker 2>to be on a ship. And I think the Japanese
<v Speaker 2>did it a few years ago for the first time.
<v Speaker 2>Russians have done it once. I mean we're talking like
<v Speaker 2>drill cores that are like eight, nine, ten kilometers deep.
<v Speaker 2>It's really an engineering problem to do that. So it's
<v Speaker 2>we can't go to the mantle. The only way the mantle.
<v Speaker 2>We can see the mantle is if it comes to us.
<v Speaker 2>So so it's this mysterious layer of earth. It comes
<v Speaker 2>to us like little chunks of it will sometimes come
<v Speaker 2>up in volcanoes. But another way it comes is through
<v Speaker 2>faulting on the seafloor, and it'll the mantle will be
<v Speaker 2>exposed on the seafloor or in California sometimes that that
<v Speaker 2>seafloor stuff gets pushed up on land. So in order
<v Speaker 2>to get the mantle on to a place where a
<v Speaker 2>geologist can walk on it, you know, Earth has to
<v Speaker 2>jump through some pretty major hoops to do it. So
<v Speaker 2>so let's start there, right. So first of all, a
<v Speaker 2>sir pentonite is metamorphosed from from mostly mantle rocks, which
<v Speaker 2>ordinarily we don't get to see, right, So the fact
<v Speaker 2>we can see serpentinites at all is a is a
<v Speaker 2>tectonic miracle, really, and and and so that's the basic stage.
<v Speaker 2>And sir pentonite forms when you take mantle rock that
<v Speaker 2>has a lot of oliven in it, and you add
<v Speaker 2>water to it at sort of slightly elevated temperatures maybe
<v Speaker 2>you know, three hundred well any any anywhere to say
<v Speaker 2>four hundred degrees celsius. That might seem pretty hot. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>that's like a pizza oven. But for the Earth, that's
<v Speaker 2>not that hot. So you take water plus peridotite and
<v Speaker 2>that gives you serpentinite. So that's the basic geology. And
<v Speaker 2>the main place is where you get that. You get
<v Speaker 2>that in subduction zones, as you say, and you get
<v Speaker 2>a lot of it on the sea floor. So that's
<v Speaker 2>the that's the basic contour.
<v Speaker 1>So I get when you say add water to it,
<v Speaker 1>so it's hydrated, but there's not because that might throw
<v Speaker 1>people off. They think add water to it, they're going
<v Speaker 1>to think that it's like wet. Can you explain that?
<v Speaker 1>Because like gypsum is like hydrated calcium sulfate, right, what
<v Speaker 1>does it mean? So what does it mean to be
<v Speaker 1>to have water in it? But be a dry mineral?
<v Speaker 2>Right? So, some minerals have water in them, as you say,
<v Speaker 2>like gypsum has water in it. Now it doesn't mean
<v Speaker 2>they're wet. What it means is that you have a mineral. Well,
<v Speaker 2>let's take a step back. What is a mineral?
<v Speaker 1>Right?
<v Speaker 2>So a mineral is a soft it's a natural solid,
<v Speaker 2>and it has a crystalline atomic structure, and that's that
<v Speaker 2>jargon means that it has a bunch of atoms in
<v Speaker 2>it that are very carefully arranged in a in a
<v Speaker 2>three dimensional pattern, and that that pattern contains elements, contains atoms.
<v Speaker 2>Sometimes those those atomic patterns contain hydrogens and oxygens, and
<v Speaker 2>the hydrogen is hydrogens and oxygens basically come from water
<v Speaker 2>that's added to minerals that don't have water. So olivine,
<v Speaker 2>this mineral and pertotite does not have H two O
<v Speaker 2>in its formula. Its formula is it's got magnesium, silicon, oxygen,
<v Speaker 2>little iron, but no H two oh. There's no hydrogen it.
<v Speaker 2>But if you take that olivine and you add H
<v Speaker 2>two O, then you get the formula for serpentine which
<v Speaker 2>has magnesium, silicon, iron, oxygen, and hydrogen in it, and
<v Speaker 2>so that hydrogen it's not like it's it's not wet
<v Speaker 2>like you say, because that's a good point, because a
<v Speaker 2>lot of people hear that they think it must be
<v Speaker 2>a wet rocks. That's not what we're talking about. What
<v Speaker 2>it means is that those hydrogens are in that atomic
<v Speaker 2>structure at certain locations in that crystalline pattern of atoms.
<v Speaker 2>So that's what it means. But to get the water
<v Speaker 2>in there, you have to have water somewhere in a rock.
<v Speaker 2>So how do you get the water into a peridotite,
<v Speaker 2>And there's several ways you do that. On the sea floor,
<v Speaker 2>it's pretty straightforward because you have mantle rocks exposed on
<v Speaker 2>the bottom of an ocean, and the water just comes
<v Speaker 2>from ocean ocean water that percolates down through faults and
<v Speaker 2>into the mantle rocks where the olivine is, so olivine
<v Speaker 2>gets in contact with water along faults on the sea floor.
<v Speaker 2>In subduction zones, the water comes from the plate that's
<v Speaker 2>being the down gooing plate that's being sucked down into
<v Speaker 2>the earth that releases water that then rises up and
<v Speaker 2>comes in contact with olivine above the plate in an
<v Speaker 2>area that we call the mantle wed and that's where
<v Speaker 2>serpententization occurs. That's where we get olivine plus water makes
<v Speaker 2>a serpentinite in a subduction zone. So so so that's
<v Speaker 2>the way to think about that is that you just
<v Speaker 2>got to think of any any way you can get
<v Speaker 2>H two O and olivine to play together at the
<v Speaker 2>right temperature, you're gonna make serpentine minerals in a serpentinite rock.
<v Speaker 1>So this zone, this subduction zone, you know, which is
<v Speaker 1>again the opposite of a rift zone, opposite of like
<v Speaker 1>a spreading center. This zone kind of acts like a
<v Speaker 1>like an easy bake oven for serpentine. It's it's there's
<v Speaker 1>a lot of pressure, there's a lot of heat, and
<v Speaker 1>there's water present, and it's it's being added to this peridotite,
<v Speaker 1>this this olivine, and that's what's creating serpentinite. Is that
<v Speaker 1>more or less what's going on?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah? I mean that, I mean, I mean, of course,
<v Speaker 2>we can get as complicated as you want, but I'm
<v Speaker 2>I'm fine with easy bake oven. I like that.
<v Speaker 1>Let's get a little more complicated because I think this
<v Speaker 1>stuff is fascinating. I love I love surprentonite.
<v Speaker 2>So okay, sure, so let's let's see what layer can
<v Speaker 2>we peel back here. First of all, technically speaking, geologists
<v Speaker 2>consider subduction zones to be cold, which is a weird concept.
<v Speaker 2>That's because the plate that's being pulled down into the mantle,
<v Speaker 2>that subducting plate, has a lower temperature than the rocks
<v Speaker 2>that are around it. And so if you know, imagine
<v Speaker 2>you know this plate, these plates on the seafloor have
<v Speaker 2>been sitting around on the sea floor cooling off like
<v Speaker 2>they formed. They formed at mid ocean ridges from volcanoes, right,
<v Speaker 2>and then they're spreading away from those mid ocean ridges
<v Speaker 2>and they get they're cooling off. The further they get
<v Speaker 2>away from that that mid ocean ridge spreading center, and
<v Speaker 2>you know, give it one hundred million years, they become
<v Speaker 2>much cooler. And that's part of the reason they sink
<v Speaker 2>back into the mantle, is because they get cold. And
<v Speaker 2>when things get cold, they get denser and they're gonna
<v Speaker 2>want to sink, so they sink back. These cold plates
<v Speaker 2>are sinking back into the earth. And so the thing
<v Speaker 2>about serpentine minerals is that they are stable at these
<v Speaker 2>so called colder temperatures. So you can say it's an
<v Speaker 2>easy bake oven. But I think a better analogy to
<v Speaker 2>use food, which I like because I like food, is
<v Speaker 2>it's more like a crock pot. It's like a slow cooker. Right.
<v Speaker 2>So if whoever doesn't you know any if you ever
<v Speaker 2>made like carnitas or like a you know, or you know,
<v Speaker 2>braised lambshanks, something like that, you know you're cooking at
<v Speaker 2>a very low slow tetanomic getting hundred smoked. You know,
<v Speaker 2>if you smoke a brisket. Where are you? You're in Texas?
<v Speaker 1>Right, yeah, I'm in Yeah, I'm in West Texas right now.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, you're in West Texas. Okay, So I can use
<v Speaker 2>I can use brisket imagery. I know that's kind of pandering,
<v Speaker 2>but I don't care.
<v Speaker 1>We don't have any serpentine out here. It's like all
<v Speaker 1>limestone and Miocene volcanics.
<v Speaker 2>Right right. I wonder where the closest serpentine is to you.
<v Speaker 2>That's a good question.
<v Speaker 1>We've got little exposures. There's a small exposure in like
<v Speaker 1>Central Texas, but it's it seems like it's you know,
<v Speaker 1>relatively recent that it's been exposed. And it's certainly not
<v Speaker 1>large enough to cause any kind of you know, plant endemism.
<v Speaker 2>So okay, yeah, yeah, the plant animism is interesting because
<v Speaker 2>you know, I too have been to serpentine. You know,
<v Speaker 2>by the way, when you're talking about plants, we'll use
<v Speaker 2>the word serpentine. That's the jargon serpentine. Barrens is the word, right.
<v Speaker 2>You probably read about that, right, Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Like ultra ultramaphic rocks, does that.
<v Speaker 2>Work too, ultramafic? Yeah, So ultra mafic is a compositional
<v Speaker 2>word that we we just that's a word we used
<v Speaker 2>to mean the chemical composition of a rock, and we
<v Speaker 2>use the word ultra mafic to describe the composition of
<v Speaker 2>of serpentonites. And that basically means very rich in magnesium
<v Speaker 2>and iron, very poor in potassium and sodium. And I
<v Speaker 2>think that combination is really weird for plants, right, because
<v Speaker 2>plants like especially like potassium right.
<v Speaker 1>Low nictam too, yeah, heavy metal very low nitrogen high
<v Speaker 1>and heavy metals high.
<v Speaker 2>In heavy metal's a lot chromium, there's a lot of nickel,
<v Speaker 2>and I don't think plants like either of those things.
<v Speaker 2>So so yeah, you get really bizarre, uh really strange plants.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, there's a whole have you been to I
<v Speaker 2>assume you've been to Kalmiopsis Wilderness up in Oregon, right,
<v Speaker 2>are you've heard of it?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah? Yeah, in San Benito County. And yeah, you know,
<v Speaker 1>I mean once once a plant devolves tolerance to serpentine,
<v Speaker 1>it's you can't really go back to normal soils because
<v Speaker 1>you'll just get out competed. You know, the same the
<v Speaker 1>same traits that make you able to withstand the serpentine
<v Speaker 1>make their maladaptive on like a normal soil, you'll just
<v Speaker 1>get smothered and now competed by other plants.
<v Speaker 2>Right exactly, exactly. So you've been to San Benito. That's
<v Speaker 2>a place called New Indria. So you've you've been there.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, yeah, it's a nice, super fun site they've
<v Speaker 1>got there. Yeah. There used to be this guy that
<v Speaker 1>would run you off whenever you came like, uh looking
<v Speaker 1>at the old factory, the mining stuff, you know, and
<v Speaker 1>even get out of just you know, it's like, hey,
<v Speaker 1>we're on the road, buddy, you know, leave us alone.
<v Speaker 2>But you know what you're talking about? The ghost town.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, the gohoes on itself. But I mean, the
<v Speaker 1>whole the whole area is just fascinating. There's a number
<v Speaker 1>and there's like tons of endemic plants there, like really cool,
<v Speaker 1>weird you know, Lily's and there was a plant called
<v Speaker 1>fertile area falcata. That falcata that was and I was
<v Speaker 1>obsessed with for a while. That only grows in serpentine talus,
<v Speaker 1>Like it's not enough to just grow in serpentine and
<v Speaker 1>occupies this really weird ecological niche of how the talus accumulates,
<v Speaker 1>you know, because the way it certain serpentine exposures fracture,
<v Speaker 1>it fractures into like these maybe thumb sized bits of
<v Speaker 1>talus that's generally soft. R.
<v Speaker 2>Wow. So it's not just a serpentine planet. It's an
<v Speaker 2>opportunistic serpentine planet. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's wild.
<v Speaker 2>It's such a crtically heroic.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's pretty cool. And it's like this, it's like
<v Speaker 1>fucking lily, Like it's like this really beautiful plant with
<v Speaker 1>blue leaves and yeah, just cool stuff. Man.
<v Speaker 2>That's that's neat, you know. That's I'm working on projects
<v Speaker 2>at nu Indria, so that's that's one of my favorite
<v Speaker 2>places on Earth.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's those barons, man are just fascinating you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's just really cool. And I've seen serpentine in the
<v Speaker 1>Baja Desert too, in Baja California, Sir. And there's a
<v Speaker 1>whole host of endemic plants down there too that's crazy,
<v Speaker 1>like Rus Lentii and Ariogonum preclarum wild stuff.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and yeah, it's it's it's a lot of fun
<v Speaker 2>for the botanist for sure.
<v Speaker 1>So okay, so this where what is is peroxine? Does
<v Speaker 1>that have any role in any of this? Or am
<v Speaker 1>I not remembering that correct? Yeah?
<v Speaker 2>They pronounced it. We pronounce it pyroxceine pyrexcene. The the
<v Speaker 2>people in Commonwealth countries call it pyroxene. If I find it,
<v Speaker 2>that's about as annoying as people that say aluminium. Uh.
<v Speaker 2>But pyroxine is is in peridotites, So it is an
<v Speaker 2>important It's the second most important mantle mineral. I would say,
<v Speaker 2>very abundant in some actually in some mantle rocks there's
<v Speaker 2>more pyroxcene than all of these. So there might be
<v Speaker 2>a pyroxceine enthusiast that may quibble with me saying that
<v Speaker 2>it's less important than all of them, but I don't care.
<v Speaker 2>And uh, it is in mantle rocks, and there are
<v Speaker 2>serpent uh, there are metamorphic reactions involving pyroxine plus olivine
<v Speaker 2>that will make serpentine. So it's an important part of
<v Speaker 2>UH of serpentonite formation, absolutely all right.
<v Speaker 1>And so but peridotite is an intrusive igneous rock. Right,
<v Speaker 1>It's like h on the spectrum of composition, you'd have
<v Speaker 1>granted at one end and peridotite at the other. Correct.
<v Speaker 2>Correct, Yeah, you're referring to the sort of the geology
<v Speaker 2>one o one chemical composition framework, which is correct. I'm
<v Speaker 2>not saying it's just because it's geology one on one
<v Speaker 2>that's not correct. That on one end we have the
<v Speaker 2>felt what we call felsic rocks, which are rich in silicon,
<v Speaker 2>rich in sodium and potassium, and we call those felsic.
<v Speaker 2>And on the other end of the spectrum we have
<v Speaker 2>the silica pore rocks, which are rich in magnesium and
<v Speaker 2>iron and relatively poor in the sodium and potassium. So,
<v Speaker 2>and the most of those are the ultramafic rocks. Absolutely
<v Speaker 2>so there gabro.
<v Speaker 1>Gabro is like the equivalent of basalt, kind of but intrust.
<v Speaker 2>Correct, that's right. And we call those MEFI. They're not
<v Speaker 2>ultra mafic.
<v Speaker 1>Right, may fix not a okay, correct, I've been pronouncing
<v Speaker 1>it mapic for like the I'll probably still do that.
<v Speaker 1>I'll forget, but I'll try to remember mafix. So do
<v Speaker 1>you ever see how often do you see gabro gabro
<v Speaker 1>exposed on a surface? I know there was a there's
<v Speaker 1>another there's a cypress species takat cypress that I always
<v Speaker 1>see on gabro soils. Yeah, but it weathers to red.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, I assume when it comes out of the ground,
<v Speaker 1>it's generally like a blackish darker color, but then it
<v Speaker 1>ends up weathering to red once the iron in it oxidizes.
<v Speaker 2>That's absolutely correct. Yep, that's right. They're rich in the
<v Speaker 2>mafic rocks have a lot of iron as ultra mafic rocks,
<v Speaker 2>and so when they weather, they'll tend Those rocks are
<v Speaker 2>gona tend tend to be read and uh, you know
<v Speaker 2>gabros are They form in a variety of ways, but
<v Speaker 2>they definitely form in magmatic systems, meaning from molten rock
<v Speaker 2>underneath volcanoes. Uh, and the ones that we see on
<v Speaker 2>the West coast. There's probably two main ways we get them.
<v Speaker 2>The most common one would be that these are magna
<v Speaker 2>chambers that were beneath mid ocean ridges, which are these
<v Speaker 2>these sea floor volcanoes. You get a lot of gabros
<v Speaker 2>that that freeze underneath the volcanoes. Uh and they never
<v Speaker 2>you know, they're they're stuck in the subsurface and then
<v Speaker 2>tectonics pushes them up on land for us to see
<v Speaker 2>them and walk on them and sample them. In southern
<v Speaker 2>California we have a fair amount of gabros as well.
<v Speaker 2>Those are not sea floor gabros. Those are magna chambers
<v Speaker 2>that are associated with a subduct zone that used to
<v Speaker 2>be here one hundred million years or so ago. In
<v Speaker 2>a cough, I'm a quick coffee hang on, okay, So yeah,
<v Speaker 2>So we have gabros in southern California that are like that,
<v Speaker 2>and then we have the other ones more in northern
<v Speaker 2>California that come from the sea floor.
<v Speaker 1>Because I always it's crazy, I didn't know so it's
<v Speaker 1>a it's a remnant of an old volcano. I always
<v Speaker 1>thought it was like a you know, as a as
<v Speaker 1>a subducting plate is going down, a little bit is
<v Speaker 1>getting scraped off like some putty and just being accreted
<v Speaker 1>to the continent. But that's not what's going on with
<v Speaker 1>the gabro in southern California.
<v Speaker 2>Huh yeah, So in in in sort of central and
<v Speaker 2>northern California, most of the gabros that are there all
<v Speaker 2>on the coast anyways, those are uh, those are pushed
<v Speaker 2>up on land from the seafloor. They're old oceanic plates
<v Speaker 2>that have been been pushed up. We tend to call
<v Speaker 2>those a special kind of rock called Ophia lighte, and
<v Speaker 2>that is just a rock that's been It's a sea floor, seafloor,
<v Speaker 2>sea oceanic excuse me, oceanic crust that's been pushed up
<v Speaker 2>on land. And in southern California we don't have that
<v Speaker 2>in the same way. There's little pockets of that. But
<v Speaker 2>most of the gabbros that are down here are associated
<v Speaker 2>with stratovolcanoes, and bigger, bigger stratovolcanos are like the Mount Fujis,
<v Speaker 2>the Mount Shastas, the Mount Saint Helen's, these big volcanoes
<v Speaker 2>on land, and those are more associated with with those
<v Speaker 2>kinds of volcanoes which form in subduction zones.
<v Speaker 1>Oh wow, okay, but those are more I mean generally
<v Speaker 1>felsic rocks though right, like it's the magma is more viscus,
<v Speaker 1>it's not as fluid.
<v Speaker 2>Or what correct, correct, but not all of it is.
<v Speaker 2>So the you know, it turns out that these these systems,
<v Speaker 2>these stratovolcanoes are complex. They have they can have really
<v Speaker 2>felsic lavas up to rhyolites, which you have a lot
<v Speaker 2>in West Texas. And you can get granites which are
<v Speaker 2>felsic intrusives. But you can also get basalts that come
<v Speaker 2>out of these volcanoes, which means you can get gabbros,
<v Speaker 2>which are the intrusive version of fasalt cool in the subsurface.
<v Speaker 2>So so I know that like the the sort of
<v Speaker 2>the intro view of subduction zoned volcanoes is that they
<v Speaker 2>tend to be more silica rich, which is true compared
<v Speaker 2>to volcano seaflow sea floor volcanics, but they're much more
<v Speaker 2>diverse than that. They have a lot of like you
<v Speaker 2>can go to the top of a of a giant
<v Speaker 2>stratovolcano and find basaltic flows sometimes, you know, So it's
<v Speaker 2>not like it's not this is more more variable.
<v Speaker 1>It's not black and white, there's no one so how
<v Speaker 1>do you when you're explaining to students, because I run
<v Speaker 1>into this all the time when I'm explaining like extrusive
<v Speaker 1>or intrusive igneous rocks to people, which is dependent just
<v Speaker 1>on grain size. I mean that's the easiest identifying factor.
<v Speaker 1>How do you explain grain size to people who are
<v Speaker 1>completely new to the idea.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, the basic idea that we teach in an intro
<v Speaker 2>class would be that when something cools very quickly, the
<v Speaker 2>crystals don't have time to form, so you get very
<v Speaker 2>very tiny crystals when something cool. And and by the way,
<v Speaker 2>when is when is something cool quickly? When it's erupted. Right,
<v Speaker 2>So when you take a hot magma in the subsurface,
<v Speaker 2>and you know, a basaltic magma, by the way, is
<v Speaker 2>going to be like at least a thousand degrees celsius
<v Speaker 2>and maybe as high as fourteen hundred degrees celsius, and
<v Speaker 2>convert that to fahrenheit, I mean that burns your house
<v Speaker 2>down instantly, right.
<v Speaker 1>It just touches it and it's entire Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Now imagine you're taking this really hot magma and you're
<v Speaker 2>erupting it at the Earth's surface to you know, I
<v Speaker 2>don't care if you're in the middle of the Sahara
<v Speaker 2>Desert and it's the hottest day ever recorded. That's going
<v Speaker 2>to be forty degrees celsius, right, So it's it'd be
<v Speaker 2>it'd be the equivalent of you know, you know, taking
<v Speaker 2>a you know, a pork roast and putting it in
<v Speaker 2>your freezer. You know, I like to use food, I said.
<v Speaker 2>So it basically like, as far as far as the
<v Speaker 2>magna is concerned, you're rupping it onto an ice sheet
<v Speaker 2>and it freezes immediately, and it doesn't have time to
<v Speaker 2>form crystals, So it doesn't form a lot of crystals,
<v Speaker 2>and the ones that it does are really it forms
<v Speaker 2>many small crystals, if at all. Sometimes it doesn't even
<v Speaker 2>have time to form crystals. It becomes what we call
<v Speaker 2>a glass with no crystals. Now, on the other hand,
<v Speaker 2>if something is cooling and that and that's what we call,
<v Speaker 2>by the way, the one with no crystals, we call
<v Speaker 2>that volcanic rock or extrusive rock. Right, So quick cooling
<v Speaker 2>very few let me phrase that, quick cooling many tiny crystals.
<v Speaker 2>And the opposite of that is intrusive or what we
<v Speaker 2>call plutonic, which is cooling in the subsurface. And when
<v Speaker 2>that happens rocks have millions of years to cool, and
<v Speaker 2>that gives a lot of time for crystals to grow,
<v Speaker 2>and so what you get is you get fewer crystals,
<v Speaker 2>but they're much bigger. And so that's the basic You know,
<v Speaker 2>if you're walking through a national park and you pick
<v Speaker 2>up a rock and it's an igneous rock, if the
<v Speaker 2>crystals are big, it's probably cooled underground as a plutonic
<v Speaker 2>or intrusive rock. And if the crystals are tiny, then
<v Speaker 2>it was probably a volcanic rock.
<v Speaker 1>So a good way to think about this, and I
<v Speaker 1>guess it would be like Joshua Tree National Park right
<v Speaker 1>iconic park, that most of the granite there is generally
<v Speaker 1>all the same age, and it probably and it's all
<v Speaker 1>the same mass, generally speaking, the same body, and it
<v Speaker 1>probably took a million or two million years to cool
<v Speaker 1>very slowly. How deep in? How deep underground do you think?
<v Speaker 2>Well, Joshua Tree. I love to teach about Joshua Tree
<v Speaker 2>because Joshua Tree is part of a very long system
<v Speaker 2>that's actually related to the Sierra Nevadas, and it's related
<v Speaker 2>to similar rocks all the way down in Baja. What
<v Speaker 2>Joshua Tree is those rocks out there are granites. They're
<v Speaker 2>technically we call them monzo granites, just a nerdy word
<v Speaker 2>for granite. Let's just call them granite. They're intrusive rocks.
<v Speaker 2>They're very large crystals in them. You can see them
<v Speaker 2>with the naked eye. You don't need any additional tools,
<v Speaker 2>no microscopes or handlenses. They cool underground. They're plutonic rocks.
<v Speaker 2>And what they're what they are is they formed inside
<v Speaker 2>an ancient volcano chain. And so the entire Sierra Nevadas,
<v Speaker 2>all those rocks out in the desert in Joshua Tree,
<v Speaker 2>they are the fossilized guts of an ancient subduction zone
<v Speaker 2>of volcano chain.
<v Speaker 1>Oh okay, that makes sense. Holy shit. So San Pedro
<v Speaker 1>Martyr down in Baja, same thing.
<v Speaker 2>Same thing that down there. We call it the Peninsular range,
<v Speaker 2>which is that's we call those rocks down in San
<v Speaker 2>Diego and down in Baja. It's called the Peninsular range.
<v Speaker 2>And but it's all the sort of the same. They're
<v Speaker 2>all roughly the same age as the Sierra Nevadas because
<v Speaker 2>in the Cretaceous period, the entire western margin, the western
<v Speaker 2>edge of the North North American Plate was just a
<v Speaker 2>huge subduction zone like we have in the modern in
<v Speaker 2>in the Andes.
<v Speaker 1>And stuff of Marilana, right, all right, is it?
<v Speaker 2>Right? That's it?
<v Speaker 1>And so that's so that's why you had all those
<v Speaker 1>because wherever you have a subduction zone, you've got a
<v Speaker 1>volcanic chain inland. So that's why all that stuff was there.
<v Speaker 1>That is just that, but it was deeper and then
<v Speaker 1>it got uplifted.
<v Speaker 2>Huh well, so yeah, so let me let me dive
<v Speaker 2>into that a little bit. So beneath every beneath every
<v Speaker 2>big volcano like Mount Fuji or Mount Saint Helens, you know,
<v Speaker 2>we see, we see all these lavas on the surface,
<v Speaker 2>but beneath it is even more molten rock that never
<v Speaker 2>got asked to make it to the surface, right, so
<v Speaker 2>it froze on its way to the surface. And so
<v Speaker 2>what happens is that that volcano, you give it one
<v Speaker 2>hundred million years, the volcano is mostly eroded away and
<v Speaker 2>that exposes these frozen you know, innards of the old volcanoes.
<v Speaker 2>And so that's that's the really that's the relationship between them.
<v Speaker 2>Did I answer your question?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, But I mean there's they had to have been
<v Speaker 1>some uplift though, too, right, Like with Joshua. So, what's
<v Speaker 1>what's causing that uplift?
<v Speaker 2>Then, well, that is those are technonic forces on the
<v Speaker 2>uh you know, on the on the west coast there
<v Speaker 2>there's a lot of I think you know this. I'm
<v Speaker 2>not quite sure what the model is right now, but
<v Speaker 2>I think there is uplift from the when you when
<v Speaker 2>you get a when you get a subduction zone, right
<v Speaker 2>when the plate bends, there's a little bit of uplift there,
<v Speaker 2>a little bit upwarping of the plate, and I think
<v Speaker 2>that's helping to push some of those rocks up. And
<v Speaker 2>there's also compleated tectonic forces around the San Andreas Fault
<v Speaker 2>and the basin and range to the east where the
<v Speaker 2>crust is being pulled apart. UH. And and also you know,
<v Speaker 2>just erosional forces. You know, one of the main things
<v Speaker 2>that's exposing and is just erosion. But you're correct, there
<v Speaker 2>has to be uplift accompanying the erosion. And so I
<v Speaker 2>don't feel like I'm answering that question very well. I
<v Speaker 2>need you to look up.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, well, I mean, well, I guess it's just important
<v Speaker 1>to know. Yeah, it was uplifted too, there's uplift, there's relief,
<v Speaker 1>but then there's uplift. Could it be? I mean, what
<v Speaker 1>is it? What is it? Litho spheric rebound when it's
<v Speaker 1>taking some off and then it kind of bounces back up.
<v Speaker 1>I guess, I mean, I guess that can do it too.
<v Speaker 1>It doesn't matter. I'm just thinking about it. But that
<v Speaker 1>brings me go ahead, let me.
<v Speaker 2>Just let me just I'll just let me. Let me
<v Speaker 2>just say, for the record, off the top of my head,
<v Speaker 2>I can't say exactly what the forces that's causing you uplift,
<v Speaker 2>but but in general you are correct. When you have
<v Speaker 2>a mountain range like that, you need to geologists puzzle
<v Speaker 2>over how uplift happened, because in order to get erosion,
<v Speaker 2>you need to have uplift. So like, contrast that with say, uh,
<v Speaker 2>you know Houston, right, Houston is in a coastal plaine,
<v Speaker 2>very flat down there in east.
<v Speaker 1>Pretty soon it's going to be in the ocean. So well,
<v Speaker 1>that's a whole other story. But the reason you don't
<v Speaker 1>get a lot of erosion in Houston like you do
<v Speaker 1>in California is because there's no uplift there. There's no
<v Speaker 1>mechanism to push the earth up because it's on a
<v Speaker 1>quiet part of the plate.
<v Speaker 2>But in California. In California, we have an active plate boundary,
<v Speaker 2>so all kinds of crazy stuff is happening to push
<v Speaker 2>things up. We have a the plate boundary gives you
<v Speaker 2>a variety of mechanisms to push land up, which is
<v Speaker 2>how you make a mountain range. So we'll just leave
<v Speaker 2>it at that.
<v Speaker 1>That okay, Okay, No, that's good dude. So but if
<v Speaker 1>you could radiometrically date like that rock and Joshua tree
<v Speaker 1>that granted, how old would it be most likely? When
<v Speaker 1>did it like Cretaceous? You said, so eighty million years
<v Speaker 1>ago or what?
<v Speaker 2>Yes, eighty I think I think the nominal age for
<v Speaker 2>a lot of these rock is one hundred million years old.
<v Speaker 2>And now someone might correct me on that, but that's fine, okay.
<v Speaker 1>But either way, it's important to know there was a
<v Speaker 1>subduction zone there before the san Andres existed. It was
<v Speaker 1>diving back into the mantle and as it does that,
<v Speaker 1>it goes. You know, it's at an angle, so inland
<v Speaker 1>a little bit like a forty five degree angle, just
<v Speaker 1>say throw it out there. That's where you get the magma,
<v Speaker 1>you know, volcano chains forming magma rising back to the surface,
<v Speaker 1>and so that's where. That's why that that whole you know,
<v Speaker 1>granitic chain is there from the Sierra Nevada down to
<v Speaker 1>San Pedro Martyr through Joshua Tree, et cetera.
<v Speaker 2>Correct. And maybe just to put a little bow on that,
<v Speaker 2>what did that look like a hundred million years ago?
<v Speaker 2>It looked something like the Cascades up in Washington State? Right,
<v Speaker 2>So you had these big volcanoes Mount Rainier, Mount Baker,
<v Speaker 2>Mount Saint Helens. That's what that. In one hundred million years,
<v Speaker 2>all those volcanoes will be eroded to expose the Joshua
<v Speaker 2>Tree style granites that were formed beneath the volcano.
<v Speaker 1>So the ryo light up top getting puked out with
<v Speaker 1>maybe a little hint of basalt of the volcanoes and
<v Speaker 1>then the granites down below.
<v Speaker 2>Correct.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, okay, cool that Yeah, that definitely helps clarify things. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>so let's talk about the Farallon plate because this is
<v Speaker 1>you know, the San Andreas is a famous How old
<v Speaker 1>is the San Andreas? Roughly thirty million years something like that.
<v Speaker 1>That's right, right, But it wasn't It wasn't always there, correct. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>there used to be the Farallon plate, which was you know,
<v Speaker 1>analogous to the Nasca Plate in South America. That's the
<v Speaker 1>one that's west of Chile, diving beneath all of South America.
<v Speaker 1>So the Farallon Plate was huge and it broke up
<v Speaker 1>when it fully subducted like a little piece. Is that
<v Speaker 1>the Wanda Fuca plate.
<v Speaker 2>Now, Yeah, the way to think about the Wanda Fuca
<v Speaker 2>is it is it is. Technically it's like the last
<v Speaker 2>gas of the Farallon Plate and it's been It's like,
<v Speaker 2>you know, most of the Farolan plate's been subducted, and
<v Speaker 2>there's a little tiny bits, a bit's an pieces that
<v Speaker 2>are still exposed at the surface and they'll they'll be
<v Speaker 2>gone soon.
<v Speaker 1>But when this thing, I mean, this was a subduction
<v Speaker 1>zone for how long you think a hundred million years?
<v Speaker 1>Two hundred million years? I mean how long was it there?
<v Speaker 1>It's a good question. I'm not sure when it started.
<v Speaker 1>We're revisiting the life and times of the Pharallom playground.
<v Speaker 2>It's a farewell our friend.
<v Speaker 1>Because it gets blamed, well, it gets blamed for a
<v Speaker 1>lot of different mountain uplifts, like I've heard it being
<v Speaker 1>blamed for the Sierra Madre Oriental and and you know
<v Speaker 1>near where I am like south of where I'm am
<v Speaker 1>like the.
<v Speaker 2>And I think it's related to Lara mine erogeny, which
<v Speaker 2>is most of the rockies in Colorado. I mean, so
<v Speaker 2>there's a whole whole host of things. I mean, it's
<v Speaker 2>a it's a mess out here, and I think a
<v Speaker 2>lot of it is due to that subduction zone.
<v Speaker 1>So this because I became interested in the Sierra Madre Oriental,
<v Speaker 1>which is, you know, near Mountterrey, Mexico, in the way
<v Speaker 1>of Leone, because it's just it's fucking wild. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>do you know much about the structure geology of that thing?
<v Speaker 1>Because it looks insane. I mean you can see it,
<v Speaker 1>you know, if you put in if you put like
<v Speaker 1>Google Maps into terrain layer, it looks like, you know,
<v Speaker 1>a rug was pushed up on a hardwood floor, like
<v Speaker 1>pushed from one side, hit a door jam on the other,
<v Speaker 1>and then just started bunching up like an accordion.
<v Speaker 2>A lot of folding.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, why why is that? Do you know? Do you
<v Speaker 1>know much about that? Or you could you throw something
<v Speaker 1>out there, like even a theory or something or what.
<v Speaker 2>I'm happy to throw something out there. I'm I'm not sure,
<v Speaker 2>not completely sure, but I think you're probably right that
<v Speaker 2>it has to do with the you know, the the convergence,
<v Speaker 2>meaning the moving together of the farrel On plate with
<v Speaker 2>the North American Plate, probably happened, you know, related to
<v Speaker 2>you know, the related to the subduction zone. It may
<v Speaker 2>be related somehow to the breakup pan of Pangaea even
<v Speaker 2>which is which has to do you know, why did
<v Speaker 2>Pangea break up? Probably because the initiation of subduction on
<v Speaker 2>the west side of the North American Plate. That's complete speculation.
<v Speaker 2>So you know, and remember that this folding, this is
<v Speaker 2>something I talked about briefly with the you know, the
<v Speaker 2>idea of the Joshua tree forming those those those granites
<v Speaker 2>and Joshua Tree forming underground and later being exposed. Remember
<v Speaker 2>that all those folds, those folded mountains probably also formed
<v Speaker 2>deep in the subsurface when rocks were bent where rocks
<v Speaker 2>are hotter and they're more plastic, more bendable, and then
<v Speaker 2>they get uplifted and exposed as mountains. So that probably formed, right,
<v Speaker 2>So those that probably formed say ten twenty thirty kilometers
<v Speaker 2>beneath the surface and then got up uplifted due to
<v Speaker 2>the Pharallne plate deuction somehow.
<v Speaker 1>But I think. I mean, obviously it's you know, it's
<v Speaker 1>it's limestone there. It's all cretaceous limestone. I think maybe
<v Speaker 1>it's a little older. But if that had been a
<v Speaker 1>granite there or something instead, would they they probably wouldn't
<v Speaker 1>have done what they did, right, because some of these,
<v Speaker 1>you know, you could see the betting plane. The limestone
<v Speaker 1>was laid down horizontally, of course, and now it's it
<v Speaker 1>damn near like an eighty degree angle, and it's created
<v Speaker 1>some spectacular cathedral like mountains and some incredible plant habitat.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, the amount of fucking plants that grow straight
<v Speaker 1>out of limestone rock walls there is just insane and
<v Speaker 1>a number of endemics. A gave elbow pilosa that's really
<v Speaker 1>bizarre looking, a gave that only grows out of limestone
<v Speaker 1>cracks in the rock. Do you think the limestone, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>the structure of the limestone, you know, as opposed to
<v Speaker 1>something like a granite, obviously dictated why they look like
<v Speaker 1>that too. Do you think or what do you think
<v Speaker 1>about that?
<v Speaker 2>That's absolutely what we know that we're talking about sedimentary
<v Speaker 2>rocks now, right. So limestones are laid, they're laid in
<v Speaker 2>flat layers in quiet oceans, right, and so granites don't
<v Speaker 2>form like that. They're just kind of like blobs in
<v Speaker 2>a lava lamp. Right, So if you know, if granites
<v Speaker 2>were caught up in there, there's no layers that could
<v Speaker 2>be folded, you know what I mean. It's it would
<v Speaker 2>be like this is a dumb food analogy. Maybe it isn't,
<v Speaker 2>but it'd be like, let's let's say that you you
<v Speaker 2>have a rug, right, and and then a dog takes
<v Speaker 2>a big dump on the rug.
<v Speaker 1>Right, Okay, like where this is going? Right, I can.
<v Speaker 2>Relay food analogy that's not food.
<v Speaker 1>Like my dog. My dog is puked on the rug.
<v Speaker 1>He's old. He's puked on my rug like five times
<v Speaker 1>in the last month.
<v Speaker 2>You know, when I said food analogy, I was thinking
<v Speaker 2>of My first thought was jello on a tablecloth, But
<v Speaker 2>all of a sudden it went to dog shit on
<v Speaker 2>a rug.
<v Speaker 1>That's great, So this is that's philosophically more won do
<v Speaker 1>you want? That's philosophically more in tune with the times?
<v Speaker 1>Dog shit on a rug?
<v Speaker 2>Let's go with that.
<v Speaker 1>Great.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, dog sit on a rug. So when you fold,
<v Speaker 2>so the dog shit is just a blob, right, that's
<v Speaker 2>what granted looks like and but I'm thinking of like
<v Speaker 2>a little bit of runny dog shit here by the way,
<v Speaker 2>and or cat barf. And uh so when you when
<v Speaker 2>that rock, it's when when I'm sorry, when the rug
<v Speaker 2>gets bunched up, you're going to see the folds in
<v Speaker 2>the rug. But then what happens to the duc shit,
<v Speaker 2>It's just going to be kind of blobbed out. It's
<v Speaker 2>not You're not going to see folds in that right, Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>it's just gonna sort of it's just it crumbles everywhere.
<v Speaker 2>It's a big mess. So that's that's what would happened
<v Speaker 2>with with a blob of granite. It's not going to
<v Speaker 2>get folded. It's just going to get sort of you know,
<v Speaker 2>you know, blobbed up and jumbled around. You're not going
<v Speaker 2>to see those layers. So that's why you know, sedimentary
<v Speaker 2>rocks are useful in that way because you can they
<v Speaker 2>actually do record. They're they're better at recording large scale
<v Speaker 2>you know, structural transformations of the rocks than than than
<v Speaker 2>a granite one.
<v Speaker 1>I guess the thing that's weird too about the the
<v Speaker 1>Sierra Madre too is it's it's a fold thrust belt
<v Speaker 1>so it's it's not technic. There's a more going on there,
<v Speaker 1>and it helps to look at there's a good YouTube
<v Speaker 1>page called the Geo Models that really helps envision is.
<v Speaker 1>But it's not just you know like, oh, it just
<v Speaker 1>crumples up and that's it. It's you know, it'll crumple up
<v Speaker 1>to a point, you know, doing that accordion thing, and
<v Speaker 1>then there'll be a break, a slippage and that and
<v Speaker 1>one one mass of that according will then start to
<v Speaker 1>slide over or under the other one. Is that kind
<v Speaker 1>of what's that? I mean? Is that right? That's what
<v Speaker 1>a full thrust belt is.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, this is a little bit. Yeah, we're a little
<v Speaker 2>bit out of my expertise. I'm more of a more
<v Speaker 2>of a sort of on the chemistry side of things.
<v Speaker 2>But I'm happy to speak extemporaneously and admit that I
<v Speaker 2>might not get this right. But so yeah, So when
<v Speaker 2>at some point when you start to fold rocks, they'll
<v Speaker 2>reach a critical point where they can't depending on the temperature,
<v Speaker 2>depending on the depth, depending on the rock type, there's
<v Speaker 2>some rocks that won't be able to sustain the folding anymore,
<v Speaker 2>and then they will they'll they fault, and so you'll
<v Speaker 2>get you know, failure of the rocks in what we
<v Speaker 2>call brittle deformation, that means cracking. Basically, they'll behave brittally
<v Speaker 2>and you get these and and and depending on the
<v Speaker 2>tectonic situation, you know, in this kind of fold thrust
<v Speaker 2>belt that you're talking about, you get you know, these
<v Speaker 2>large scale faults that will push these folded rocks up
<v Speaker 2>on each other into sort of a complex, you know,
<v Speaker 2>folded accordion type of structure that probably looks very beautiful
<v Speaker 2>you see them, that's probably probably really cool looking. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>those large scale faults are called thrust faults, where a
<v Speaker 2>rock will get pushed up at a low angle onto
<v Speaker 2>another rock. And so I can imagine that that happening
<v Speaker 2>with with highly folded limestones or sedimentar your eyes for sure.
<v Speaker 1>So this could have so this is basically it's a
<v Speaker 1>convergent force to cause this, and it could have quite
<v Speaker 1>correct easily could have been the Perollon plate.
<v Speaker 2>Then I guess, huh, yeah, I mean I would think
<v Speaker 2>of the Ferrollon plate is being subducted. But there are
<v Speaker 2>forces in every subduction zone. There are forces that move
<v Speaker 2>the the subducted plate towards the overriding plate, and the
<v Speaker 2>overwriting plate is moving towards the subductive plate. Let me
<v Speaker 2>let me let me back up a second. So, I
<v Speaker 2>think when we think of subduction zones, people think the
<v Speaker 2>only force is the down gooing plate. It's just being
<v Speaker 2>sucked down, right, But that's sucking of the down gooing
<v Speaker 2>plate actually pulls in the overriding plate. So so not
<v Speaker 2>only is the subduction plate going down, but the overriding
<v Speaker 2>plate is being also being sucked towards this towards the trench,
<v Speaker 2>towards that that plate boundary. And so there's there's convergent
<v Speaker 2>forces that are operating there that can be very complex.
<v Speaker 2>So and I'll leave it there because again, as I said,
<v Speaker 2>it's a little bit out of my expertise, these large
<v Speaker 2>scale tectonic strikes.
<v Speaker 1>I I appreciate you being down to you know, get
<v Speaker 1>your toes with it, because it's it's fun to fine about.
<v Speaker 1>But but but okay, so what are you gonna say
<v Speaker 1>I'm wrong?
<v Speaker 2>I'm just saying I'm wrong all the time, and you know,
<v Speaker 2>but that's never stopping before.
<v Speaker 1>It's okay, we could we can all be loose with that.
<v Speaker 1>It's just the goal is just to get people thinking
<v Speaker 1>about this on these you know how these land masses
<v Speaker 1>move on these huge scales. So the Farallone plate is
<v Speaker 1>being subducted roughly one hundred million years ago. At a
<v Speaker 1>certain point it gets fully subducted, and then because it's
<v Speaker 1>got an odd shape to it, and then it breaks
<v Speaker 1>off to the wand the Fuca plate as well. And
<v Speaker 1>then how does the San Andreas open up? Because when
<v Speaker 1>the Phara line plate's fully subducted, that's when you get
<v Speaker 1>the San Andreas occurring.
<v Speaker 2>Correct, correct, So what happened? This is what the tectonics
<v Speaker 2>of California are very interesting in this way. So the
<v Speaker 2>Fara line plate is being subducted, but to the west
<v Speaker 2>of the Pharallon plate. So let's set the stage. The
<v Speaker 2>Para line plate is being subducted. To the east is
<v Speaker 2>North America, and to the west of the Pharallon plate
<v Speaker 2>is a mid ocean ridge system which we call the
<v Speaker 2>East Pacific Rise. That's a spreading center right where the
<v Speaker 2>plates are moving apart. And so as the Farallon plate
<v Speaker 2>is being subducted, this specific rise also gets subducted. So
<v Speaker 2>it's it's a very strange situation where where we're subducting
<v Speaker 2>a mid ocean ridge system.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, okay, and it's counterintuitive, man, it's weird to think about.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's it's very weird, and it has a lot
<v Speaker 2>of interesting geologic hor implications. And if you've you know,
<v Speaker 2>you've looked at a map of a mid ocean ridge system, right,
<v Speaker 2>it's kind of got that stair step pattern too, it is,
<v Speaker 2>that's so familiar.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, there's many transform faults in between those.
<v Speaker 2>Correct. The good the transform faults, that's where the plates
<v Speaker 2>are sliding past each other. And so what happens if
<v Speaker 2>you subduct a mid ocean ridge system, then you're subducting
<v Speaker 2>transform faults, and that's basically that transform fault that's being
<v Speaker 2>subducted has propagated into the modern day Sandrean's.
<v Speaker 1>Fault, which is like exponentially longer than any ex.
<v Speaker 2>Ntionally longer any other transform fault. Correct, I'm sure people
<v Speaker 2>have written papers about this. That's probably because the transform
<v Speaker 2>fault that got subducted was in oceanic crust, really thin
<v Speaker 2>oceanic crust, and when that gets subducted beneath the continent,
<v Speaker 2>the continent of course is no more coherent and we
<v Speaker 2>lose the spreading center, those those go away, and so
<v Speaker 2>the whole thing just evolves into this big transform fault.
<v Speaker 1>And so does the transform fault. It runs beneath the
<v Speaker 1>Sea of Cortes, right, that big inland body of water,
<v Speaker 1>not inland, but body of water on the east side
<v Speaker 1>of Baja, California. Is that is that? When? That's?
<v Speaker 2>When?
<v Speaker 1>Is that? When did I'm confusing this now? When did
<v Speaker 1>Baja start moving away from the mainland like five six
<v Speaker 1>million years ago?
<v Speaker 2>Right? I'm not sure, but I bet that's about right,
<v Speaker 2>because well, what happens is the San Andreas Fault actually
<v Speaker 2>kind of poops out and ends around the salt and
<v Speaker 2>sea near near the beautiful village of Bombay Beach. Have
<v Speaker 2>you ever been there? Oh yeah, oh yeah, I love
<v Speaker 2>Bombay Beach.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. The whole area is just man, it is something else.
<v Speaker 1>It's like pest this like petrochemical agriculture myth, but also
<v Speaker 1>some beautiful rocks.
<v Speaker 2>It's glorious.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>And don't forget this the mountain, the folk art mountain
<v Speaker 2>where the guy paints God is love. And then there's
<v Speaker 2>city where the people squat on an old arm. It's
<v Speaker 2>just great. The best of California. Yeah, man, So the
<v Speaker 2>San Andreas fault, you know, it ends around right there,
<v Speaker 2>and what happens in that area it becomes it converts
<v Speaker 2>into it from the Saltan Sea to the Sea of Cortez.
<v Speaker 2>Sea of Cortes, we're converting back into a min ocean
<v Speaker 2>ridge system.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't even realize that. Oh no, ship okay, yeah, right.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah. So the salt the salt and sea is
<v Speaker 2>is a is a. I mean that's why there's a
<v Speaker 2>sea there by the way, there's a low lying area.
<v Speaker 2>That's because the crust is spreading apart there, like in
<v Speaker 2>Death Valley.
<v Speaker 1>Right, So there's new magma coming up from below right
<v Speaker 1>beneath the Sultan.
<v Speaker 2>Well, it wants beneath the Salton sea. I mean, oh,
<v Speaker 2>in Sea of Cortez. Yes, there's a spreading center there
<v Speaker 2>and and that will propagate northward into the salt and
<v Speaker 2>sea area. Let's give it five million years. That'll open
<v Speaker 2>up into a new sea, a continental risk, right that
<v Speaker 2>this one's not going to be failed. And there's there's
<v Speaker 2>spreading centers and transform faults in a whole mid ocean
<v Speaker 2>ridge system that is going down the Sea of Cortez
<v Speaker 2>that connects with the specific rise that's the modern eat
<v Speaker 2>specific rides.
<v Speaker 1>Wow wow, So what this for anybody listening who's you know,
<v Speaker 1>made it this far through the podcast? That is not
<v Speaker 1>interesting geology? This is why, Okay, this is this is
<v Speaker 1>fucking coolo, because this is how you know, bah California
<v Speaker 1>has a ton of endemic plants, plants that only grow
<v Speaker 1>in Baja and are restricted to that peninsula, because that's
<v Speaker 1>what is required for speciation is isolation. What creates that
<v Speaker 1>isolation the fucking seafloor spreading center beneath you know the
<v Speaker 1>fact that the sea floor spreading center beneath the Sea
<v Speaker 1>of Cortez, which is causing Baja California to move away
<v Speaker 1>from mainland Mexico. So once again we see the intersection
<v Speaker 1>of evolution, botany, and geology.
<v Speaker 2>So okay, absolutely, So what is.
<v Speaker 1>In the forecast for the San Andreas fault? I mean
<v Speaker 1>this is that is that just going to keep propagating
<v Speaker 1>new spreading centers and separation from the North American continent
<v Speaker 1>or what.
<v Speaker 2>Let's see, you know, I'm trying to what are the
<v Speaker 2>models for the San Andreas. I think eventually what's going
<v Speaker 2>to happen is that the Sea of Cortes and the spreading,
<v Speaker 2>the rifting that's going on there is going to propagate
<v Speaker 2>northward into deep into the Mojave Desert, deep into Nava
<v Speaker 2>because that whole area is spreading apart. That's a region
<v Speaker 2>of that's that's the region of It's the region of
<v Speaker 2>North America that we call the basin.
<v Speaker 1>Right yeah, right in, Salt Lake City and Reno are
<v Speaker 1>moving away from each.
<v Speaker 2>Other, absolutely, and so what's going to happen is that
<v Speaker 2>that sea is going to eventually make its way into
<v Speaker 2>you know, central Nevada, and we're going to have a
<v Speaker 2>brand new ocean. I'd give that now, let's give it
<v Speaker 2>fifteen twenty million years.
<v Speaker 1>Wow. I didn't, man, I didn't realize it because I
<v Speaker 1>was going to ask it at at some point too.
<v Speaker 1>I said, you know, the basin and range thin crust.
<v Speaker 1>That's why there's all those hot springs, and it's thin crust.
<v Speaker 1>Because Reno and Salt Lake are moving away from each other.
<v Speaker 1>And so what, Yeah, I was going to ask you,
<v Speaker 1>what's eventually going to happen? I mean, because that that
<v Speaker 1>is basically a very very young baby rift zone right
<v Speaker 1>there or.
<v Speaker 2>What Yes, yes, absolutely, And that has to do with
<v Speaker 2>the complex tectonics of the complex tectonic forces on the
<v Speaker 2>west coast of them America related to the subduction of
<v Speaker 2>the Pharaalm plate and the subduction of the East Pacific
<v Speaker 2>rise to form the San Andres fault, and the just
<v Speaker 2>the weird forces that are going on when you subduct
<v Speaker 2>a mid ocean ridge. So again I can't get more
<v Speaker 2>much more detailed than that, but but it's yeah, it's
<v Speaker 2>kind of and also there's a there's a force, you know,
<v Speaker 2>the San Andres Sanadre's fault, the west side of it
<v Speaker 2>is moving, is moving to the north. That's why we
<v Speaker 2>say that you know, La will be a suburb of
<v Speaker 2>San Francisco in twenty five million years. And so there's
<v Speaker 2>a there's a force that's sort of like we call
<v Speaker 2>it a transitentional force, which means it's a force that's
<v Speaker 2>that's sort of like sliding past each other. But while
<v Speaker 2>it's sliding past each other, that the friction there is
<v Speaker 2>aiding AI d I NG aiding the pool apart on
<v Speaker 2>the in the Nevada side. So it's like this big
<v Speaker 2>friction force Sander's faults moving by, but as it's moving
<v Speaker 2>it by, it's cooling apart the crust in the Vada
<v Speaker 2>and Arizona and the Mahabi.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's you know, what I always thought was cool
<v Speaker 1>was when you look at it, like a geologic map
<v Speaker 1>of California. And I used to have like one of
<v Speaker 1>those seven foot tall ones you know you could buy from.
<v Speaker 1>I think I got it in Sacramento at the USGS there.
<v Speaker 1>But you know, you follow the San Andreas and you
<v Speaker 1>can literally connect And this was I learned this in
<v Speaker 1>the geology class I took, which was, you know, such
<v Speaker 1>a cool thing to be able to see. But you
<v Speaker 1>look at the where the fault is on the map,
<v Speaker 1>and you you know, the rocks are all color coded
<v Speaker 1>and you can see like, oh, the the granites in
<v Speaker 1>Point Reas and the granites in the Santa Cruz Mountains
<v Speaker 1>literally came from down way down south and you can
<v Speaker 1>see like a breadcrumb trail of where you know, where
<v Speaker 1>they connect to the same color, but like two hundred
<v Speaker 1>miles south.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. The one of the one of the one of
<v Speaker 2>those situations that we like to teach in southern California
<v Speaker 2>is that you've probably been to Pinnacles National Park, Yes,
<v Speaker 2>and yeah, it's a cool place people like to rock climb.
<v Speaker 2>A lot of rhyolites are there. That's about, let's say,
<v Speaker 2>a couple hours south of San Francisco, and those are
<v Speaker 2>rhyolites that are there, and it's a fun place to go,
<v Speaker 2>very hot in the summer. But that exactly that rock,
<v Speaker 2>the rhyolites that are in that rock, those volcanic rocks
<v Speaker 2>are identical to rocks down in southern California, near a
<v Speaker 2>town called Lancaster, And we call those the Kneeknock volcanics
<v Speaker 2>N E, N A c H volcanics, these little mountains
<v Speaker 2>that are there, but they're exactly the same and so
<v Speaker 2>they they're they're the same rock type, they're the same age.
<v Speaker 2>And so it's little things like that that are really
<v Speaker 2>strong evidence for the whole entire theory of plate tectonics.
<v Speaker 2>You know, So those are those are neat little things,
<v Speaker 2>and how do you how else could you explain identical
<v Speaker 2>rock types? You know, two hundred and fifty miles away,
<v Speaker 2>not just identical rock types, but I actual identical rocks.
<v Speaker 2>An outcrop that's been split into and part of it
<v Speaker 2>moved north to a national park, and you know, the
<v Speaker 2>other park got left behind in south of California, so
<v Speaker 2>those are those are neat things. So you're making those
<v Speaker 2>exact same observations that all just have been making to support.
<v Speaker 2>It's so cool. It's so cool.
<v Speaker 1>Then you think about how much time it must have
<v Speaker 1>taken for that to occur, because you know there most
<v Speaker 1>plates are moving at what roughly the speed your fingernails grow,
<v Speaker 1>that's right, And so thinking about okay, well if that's
<v Speaker 1>two hundred miles away, like Jesus, right, that's a long
<v Speaker 1>that's a really long amount of time. Like what was
<v Speaker 1>what was going on back back then? It's it's so.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, the time scale, you know. And I've been doing
<v Speaker 2>this for a while, and but you when I stopped
<v Speaker 2>to think about it, it still hurts my head just think
<v Speaker 2>about geologic time scales. Like here's a little exercise I
<v Speaker 2>tell to interest students. Imagine, let's estimate how much how
<v Speaker 2>much dust builds up in your room in a year
<v Speaker 2>if you didn't dust, if you were like a total
<v Speaker 2>slob and you didn't dust, and you know, how much
<v Speaker 2>would would build up in your room. You know, I'll
<v Speaker 2>just throw out a millimeter, right, Maybe that's a little,
<v Speaker 2>maybe that's a lot. I don't know, but maybe not.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, dust gets you know, dust can build up
<v Speaker 2>or maybe if you've got pass you got pets, right,
<v Speaker 2>or maybe dust on your car or something. Right, Let's
<v Speaker 2>just say a millimeter a year right now, that doesn't
<v Speaker 2>feel like a lot. But if you multiply that by
<v Speaker 2>a million years, right, which isn't a long time geologically speaking,
<v Speaker 2>you end up with like a kilometer of sediment. Right.
<v Speaker 2>So like if it's a lot, right, if you go
<v Speaker 2>on to ten million years, you get like ten kilometers.
<v Speaker 2>I might be getting the mass a little bit off,
<v Speaker 2>but you get the idea, right. So things that you
<v Speaker 2>think aren't a lot when you know, you know, things
<v Speaker 2>that you a rate that you think isn't very much
<v Speaker 2>like your fingernail growing, if you extend that over a
<v Speaker 2>reasonable geologic uh, you know, time frame become enormous like
<v Speaker 2>your you know, your fingernails, you know, give it a
<v Speaker 2>billion years, your fingernails go to the moon or something right, Right,
<v Speaker 2>But once you start, once you start thinking about things
<v Speaker 2>like that, you're like, dang, anything is possible.
<v Speaker 1>Well, I think too, and then you just but then
<v Speaker 1>you're actually able to picture how the land around you forms,
<v Speaker 1>and you know, same thing with same thing with evolution.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, you know, people will say, how does a
<v Speaker 1>cact just know how to look like a rack? You're thinking,
<v Speaker 1>you're thinking too short, You're thinking like a human right,
<v Speaker 1>You're thinking on the span of a human lifespan. You know,
<v Speaker 1>think of how how think of how an environment can
<v Speaker 1>select for these traits over long amounts of time, you know.
<v Speaker 1>And it's and it doesn't just go from like a
<v Speaker 1>music habitat to a desert instantaneously. It takes a while.
<v Speaker 1>You know.
<v Speaker 2>It's and it's not like it's also this is this
<v Speaker 2>is you know, I'm glad you brought that up. It's
<v Speaker 2>a common misconception about adaptation. But the plant doesn't decide
<v Speaker 2>to change, right. The environment forces the plant to die
<v Speaker 2>or live. And whoever lives is the one that you
<v Speaker 2>see today. It's not like you know what I mean.
<v Speaker 1>I love all. That's what I love too, man, because
<v Speaker 1>I love when you see these little bits on social
<v Speaker 1>media about how evolution works or how someone today that's like, oh,
<v Speaker 1>the moon is just the right distance from the Sun
<v Speaker 1>so that you know, it's the diameter that we see
<v Speaker 1>it at just perfectly fills up the Sun's diameter so
<v Speaker 1>we can view an eclipse, and there's always someone being like, wow,
<v Speaker 1>it's proof of a god. It's like, well, not saying
<v Speaker 1>God doesn't exist, but that's not the proof of it.
<v Speaker 1>You're thinking. You literally have the freaking rational skills of
<v Speaker 1>a nine year old no offense, you know. But the
<v Speaker 1>way that these things work, I mean you have to
<v Speaker 1>zoom out, you know. That's the beauty of thinking on
<v Speaker 1>this grandiose timescale and starting to piece things together, and
<v Speaker 1>also just being able to think far beyond what you
<v Speaker 1>already know, like your mind, your worldview is not just
<v Speaker 1>restricted to the tiny, you know, windowless room of your
<v Speaker 1>own mind. Now you're able to kind of zoom out
<v Speaker 1>and get more of like a drone's eye view of
<v Speaker 1>the world around you. And that's one of the most
<v Speaker 1>beautiful things about being human to me is you know,
<v Speaker 1>looking watching this ape, start to kind of like get
<v Speaker 1>an understanding and kind of get the hint that like, wow,
<v Speaker 1>there's a lot more going on here, and then what's
<v Speaker 1>directly in front of me?
<v Speaker 2>Amen?
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, sorry, I went there. Okay, let's talk about
<v Speaker 1>you got time to talk about sedimentary rocks here for me? Okay,
<v Speaker 1>let's talk I want to talk about limestone, because where
<v Speaker 1>I am there's a lot of limestone. It's all it's
<v Speaker 1>all limestone, and just like serpentine, but not as pronounced,
<v Speaker 1>you get a lot of limestone endemic plants, which is
<v Speaker 1>such a cool phenomenon. I mean, fucking pot peyote is
<v Speaker 1>a limestone endemic plant, or at least calcareous soils. So
<v Speaker 1>and also what I've learned, what I've started to pay
<v Speaker 1>attention to since living in a limestone area is how
<v Speaker 1>it weathers, not just mechanically but chemically. There's literally a reaction.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, you can be on the rocks out here
<v Speaker 1>in the desert and you see this dimpling pattern and
<v Speaker 1>you're like, what the fuck? You're an extreme example that
<v Speaker 1>might be dog tooth karst right, like I saw in
<v Speaker 1>Dominican Republic, where you've got a tropical environment, you know,
<v Speaker 1>heavy rainfall literally eating away at these you know, old
<v Speaker 1>coral reefs that have been uplifted. How do you start
<v Speaker 1>to explain to students, one how does limestone form? And
<v Speaker 1>two how does it weather and form soils? Which is
<v Speaker 1>seemingly pretty quickly relatively speaking, how fastly it weather's compared
<v Speaker 1>to other rocks.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so okay, So how does limestone form limestone? You know,
<v Speaker 2>most limestone forms actually the same way we get minerals
<v Speaker 2>precipitated in our pipes at home, right, So, limestone is
<v Speaker 2>made of a mineral, most mostly calcite, sometimes dolemite. Let's
<v Speaker 2>just stick with the calcite. Calcite has a chemical composition
<v Speaker 2>calcium carbonate. And so what you need is you need
<v Speaker 2>water that has a lot of calcium and it has
<v Speaker 2>a lot of carbonate ions in it, and then what
<v Speaker 2>happens is is that'll become saturated and you'll get carbonate.
<v Speaker 2>Calcium carbonate crystals will rain out of the solution onto
<v Speaker 2>the bottom of the ocean, or little animals will pull
<v Speaker 2>the calcium carbonate to make the shells and then they
<v Speaker 2>die and the shells fall to the bottom of the ocean.
<v Speaker 2>But it's basically all the process is the same essentially,
<v Speaker 2>which is that the calcium carbonate, the calcite minerals are
<v Speaker 2>precipitated from solution and that's what happens in our pipes. Right,
<v Speaker 2>So we have calcium and especially if you live in
<v Speaker 2>a place with hard water like Florida or West Texas.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, leaky toilet syndrome, you got leaky toilets that run,
<v Speaker 1>you got to go in there and clean the mineral
<v Speaker 1>accumulates off of it.
<v Speaker 2>Correct the mineral. You're basically making limestone in your toilets.
<v Speaker 2>So it's calcium carbonate that's coming out of the water
<v Speaker 2>and forming mineralizations in your toilet or wherever, or it
<v Speaker 2>clogs your pipes, all these things, and so we call
<v Speaker 2>that a chemical sedimentary rock. So sedimentary rocks form in
<v Speaker 2>a variety of ways. Sandstones formed by accumulation of sand
<v Speaker 2>like at a beach or something. A mudstone forms wherever
<v Speaker 2>you get mud, but it's all stuff that kind of
<v Speaker 2>falls down onto the ground and gets hard over and
<v Speaker 2>over time. And calcium and a limestone is a chemical
<v Speaker 2>sedimentary rock where it minerals precipitate out according to the
<v Speaker 2>laws of chemistry, and they form rockal areas like that.
<v Speaker 2>So that's how the limestone forms. And so that tells
<v Speaker 2>us something about geologic history. It tells us that wherever
<v Speaker 2>you find limestone, you had some sort of an ocean,
<v Speaker 2>usually some sort of an ocean, usually a warm ocean,
<v Speaker 2>where calcium carbonate falls out of out of the water
<v Speaker 2>and onto the onto the onto the sea floor, usually
<v Speaker 2>it's a shallow ocean, a shallow marine environment. And so
<v Speaker 2>the fact that you see all these reefs in West Texas,
<v Speaker 2>you know, what's what's that McKittrick Canyon and Mountains National Part.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, McKittrick. Yeah. But but I'm so, I'm it's
<v Speaker 1>not just biogenic calcite. It's not just you know, calcium
<v Speaker 1>carbonate forming from uh cocoa, lithophores and form inifer. It's
<v Speaker 1>also just kind of in there. Maybe it was washed.
<v Speaker 1>There's just calcium carbonate floating around in the ocean in general,
<v Speaker 1>generally being washed off of land.
<v Speaker 2>Well, no, it's what it's. It's you have calcium and
<v Speaker 2>carbonate ions that are in the ocean water and some
<v Speaker 2>and sometimes they will just precipitate directly out of the
<v Speaker 2>solution without any biological process exactly exactly analogous to why
<v Speaker 2>you're getting leaky toilets syndrome. Right, So there's no there's
<v Speaker 2>no coral reef in your pipes in West Texas that's
<v Speaker 2>cooling calcium carbonate out of the water. It just comes
<v Speaker 2>out because it could becomes saturated in the solution, like
<v Speaker 2>like here, here's the way, here's a way to think
<v Speaker 2>about it. Uh, let's see. You imagine that you you
<v Speaker 2>dissolve a bunch of salt and water, right, like on
<v Speaker 2>the stove you're making you're cooking some pasta, right, you
<v Speaker 2>make a spaghetti, spaghetti, spaghetti carbon r or something you're putting.
<v Speaker 2>You're making your You know they say your pasta water
<v Speaker 2>should taste like the Adriatic. Right, So you add a
<v Speaker 2>lot of pasta water. You add a lot of salt
<v Speaker 2>to your pasta water. Now you can imagine if you
<v Speaker 2>took if you took that salty water and you left
<v Speaker 2>it on your calendar, the water will evaporate and little crystals. Eventually,
<v Speaker 2>once enough water evaporates, little salty crystals will start to
<v Speaker 2>precipitate in your in your bowl.
<v Speaker 1>Right, the solution reaches a tipping point.
<v Speaker 2>The solution, right, we call that saturation, which is a
<v Speaker 2>saturation point. So now I'm giving you an analogy using salt.
<v Speaker 2>It's not quite a perfect analogy, but it's very similar
<v Speaker 2>to what goes on in a pipe or in an ocean,
<v Speaker 2>where you have enough calcium carbonate in solution that it
<v Speaker 2>will reach saturation and you just sort of get solid
<v Speaker 2>particles of calcium carbonate that precipitate on on the sea floor.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, okay, so but it's not it's not all coke lithophores,
<v Speaker 1>but there's a lot of coco lithophors in there.
<v Speaker 2>Sure, I mean form aniferra what you need it.
<v Speaker 1>But they're they're they're getting the calcium carbonate to build
<v Speaker 1>their shells from the same place that the non biogenic
<v Speaker 1>calcarious who is getting it from? Its just dissolved in seawater.
<v Speaker 2>Correct, that's right. And the reason probably the reason that
<v Speaker 2>these these little critters with with calcareous shells are able
<v Speaker 2>to live is because there's so much calcium and carbonate
<v Speaker 2>in the seawater. It's it's pretty easy for them to
<v Speaker 2>extract it and build a shell, right, So you need
<v Speaker 2>to have something. It helps if you're a critter and
<v Speaker 2>you make your home from taking that out of seawater.
<v Speaker 2>It helps to be close to saturation, it's much easier
<v Speaker 2>to extract it.
<v Speaker 1>But either way, this stuff is sinking down to the
<v Speaker 1>bottom and forming this calcium carbonate rich mud. Right is that?
<v Speaker 2>Yes, that's that's right. And the mud sometimes sometimes limestones
<v Speaker 2>are fossiliferous, which have the fossils in it. Sometimes We
<v Speaker 2>call them mecritic, which is it's a it's a nerd
<v Speaker 2>word that just means, you know, mud, A lot of
<v Speaker 2>it formed from inorganic precipitation of fossils, I mean, not fossils.
<v Speaker 2>Excuse me, I just contradict myself inorganic precipitation of calcium
<v Speaker 2>carbonate crystals, you know. So there's a variety of ways,
<v Speaker 2>so you know, but I guess I'm trying to steer
<v Speaker 2>you to the first order interpretation is that all calcium
<v Speaker 2>carbonate comes out of the ocean water, whether or not
<v Speaker 2>it's an animal taking it out, or whether or not
<v Speaker 2>it's just like chemical precipitation without an animal.
<v Speaker 1>Either way, we know this. There was an ocean here
<v Speaker 1>at some point.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and I think the best evidence is is, I mean,
<v Speaker 2>the calcium carbonate itself is good evidence for that.
<v Speaker 1>So yeah, and do you know on that note, because
<v Speaker 1>I want to move on to silica too, But on
<v Speaker 1>that note, really clearly why some limestone is really really
<v Speaker 1>abrasive they call you know, I've heard it referred to
<v Speaker 1>as tear pants limestone. See a lot of that in
<v Speaker 1>the Mohave Desert, like sandpaper. And then other limestone is
<v Speaker 1>very move in kind of powdery, like something you'd see
<v Speaker 1>and like Ernst Naha and big Ben National Park or something.
<v Speaker 1>Do you know what the reason for that is? Is
<v Speaker 1>there for made form differently different chemical constituents? What's that?
<v Speaker 1>What's up?
<v Speaker 2>What was that word you used?
<v Speaker 1>The tear pants limestone terra pants, tear terror pants because
<v Speaker 1>it'll tear your pants. Oh, I've just heard it. Like
<v Speaker 1>someone just told me. I was like, why is a limestone?
<v Speaker 1>It was a she was, she was a geologist in Arizona.
<v Speaker 1>She's like, Oh, they call it tear pants limestone? What
<v Speaker 1>the fuck?
<v Speaker 2>What? What? Oh?
<v Speaker 1>Okay? Literally terror pants?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, So I think what's going on? Is it discusts
<v Speaker 2>back to a question you had that I hadn't answered yet,
<v Speaker 2>which is the dissolution of limestone and how rainwater dissolves limestone.
<v Speaker 2>So rainwater is, believe it or not, is acidic. Maybe
<v Speaker 2>you probably knew that already. It has a PhD about
<v Speaker 2>five point five. And the reason it's a cidic is
<v Speaker 2>because it dissolves CO two from the atmosphere into the
<v Speaker 2>water and that creates carbonic acid in rain water, and
<v Speaker 2>that when that rainwater hits limestone, limestone is very soluble
<v Speaker 2>in acid, and over millions of years, that rain water
<v Speaker 2>will drip on the limestone and start to dissolve it.
<v Speaker 2>And sometimes that process, which we call chemical weathering or
<v Speaker 2>the dissolution, the dissolving of the limestone will create a
<v Speaker 2>rough surface, and it could be sometimes the rough surfaces
<v Speaker 2>are you know, I can imagine in a desert, by
<v Speaker 2>the way, you don't get a lot of rain, right,
<v Speaker 2>so you just get a few drops hit here and there,
<v Speaker 2>and that may that may preserve jagged edges, whereas if
<v Speaker 2>you go to Texas you get a lot more rain,
<v Speaker 2>maybe like or in Florida, we have exposures of limestone. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I don't think. I don't think they're ever terra pants.
<v Speaker 2>They're always pretty smooths because there's just so much darn
<v Speaker 2>rain that if you get any jagged edge form from dissolution,
<v Speaker 2>it's going to get eaten away by rain anyways. So
<v Speaker 2>I think it could be a it could be a
<v Speaker 2>feature of weathering and arid environments of limestone.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think.
<v Speaker 2>And also sometimes you can get resistant fossils that are
<v Speaker 2>in the limestone that have silica in them and that
<v Speaker 2>doesn't erode in rain water and so those can sometimes
<v Speaker 2>stick up, so that can also create a little bit
<v Speaker 2>of a rough a rough edge. You can get chirt
<v Speaker 2>beds that sometimes will do that. But I suspect the
<v Speaker 2>main thing that you're talking about, it's just the the
<v Speaker 2>intrinsic weathering pattern of having just a little bit of
<v Speaker 2>acidic rainwater in a desert and that, let's that creates
<v Speaker 2>kind of a more of a rough textured weathering.
<v Speaker 1>I suspect that's what's going on. Yeah, and there's well,
<v Speaker 1>there's less rain tutive to further, Yeah, there's there's less uh,
<v Speaker 1>there's weathering to an extent maybe, and then yet so
<v Speaker 1>it creates like this knife edge, and then the knife
<v Speaker 1>edge isn't worn down as easily.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, exactly. That's that's a great way to think about it.
<v Speaker 2>A good analogy would be I learned this in a
<v Speaker 2>geography class once, you know, I was a geography major
<v Speaker 2>in college by the way, not a geology major. But
<v Speaker 2>you know, if you go to like the bad bad
<v Speaker 2>Lands National Park, I assume you've been there, you've been everywhere, right, yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>So bad Lands has these beautiful spires, right, these really steep,
<v Speaker 2>dramatic erosional features, and that the reason you get those there?
<v Speaker 2>I mean they're they're they're eroding in clay deposits. Basically,
<v Speaker 2>clay deposits are everywhere, right, there's clay deposits. There's red
<v Speaker 2>clay in Georgia, there's clays in East Texas, there's clays
<v Speaker 2>all over the place. So why is it at bad
<v Speaker 2>Lands National Park that they're so pretty? We made a
<v Speaker 2>national park out of it? Right? Why are they so
<v Speaker 2>jagged there? It's it's less it's uh, it's but they're
<v Speaker 2>they're more jagged there than they are in the desert. Right.
<v Speaker 2>So the reason is is because there's just enough rainfall.
<v Speaker 2>It's actually because it's semi arid. There's just enough rainfall
<v Speaker 2>to create a lot of erosion. But there's also not
<v Speaker 2>enough rainfall to create a lot of plants to cover everything,
<v Speaker 2>so the landscapes are a little bit more irrodible.
<v Speaker 1>There's a window, it's like a perfect it's like a fine,
<v Speaker 1>cold window exactly.
<v Speaker 2>You get you get if that happened in a desert,
<v Speaker 2>it would still be cool looking, but it wouldn't be
<v Speaker 2>as dramatic because there's not quite enough rain to make
<v Speaker 2>it that dramatic. But you would also never get it
<v Speaker 2>in you know, to the east, in say the Midwest,
<v Speaker 2>because there's too there's so much rain, it'll erode the
<v Speaker 2>knife edges away. So it's sort of like a sweet spot.
<v Speaker 2>And so that that's why, you know, that's why. And
<v Speaker 2>there's probably a sweet spot. When we're talking about a
<v Speaker 2>different idea of the terra pants, let me use that
<v Speaker 2>the terra pants in the desert, there's probably a sweet spot.
<v Speaker 2>Like if you go to the Sahara Desert where there's
<v Speaker 2>really no water, you're probably not going to get any
<v Speaker 2>there's probably going to be very little weathering at all,
<v Speaker 2>you know. So but somehow in the Mohavei sometimes you
<v Speaker 2>get these monsoon rains that come up in the summer,
<v Speaker 2>so you do be a little bit of rains.
<v Speaker 1>It's it's great, it's really could be that tearpants is
<v Speaker 1>really good for walking on, especially when it's like a
<v Speaker 1>you know, a bed of rock that's been uplifted at
<v Speaker 1>like sixty degrees and you're trying to get to the
<v Speaker 1>top of it. You don't have to worry about slipping
<v Speaker 1>and breaking your asses easily. Yes, you know, really good.
<v Speaker 1>So it really tears, it really does tear the shit
<v Speaker 1>out of your shoes and you're it's hilarious, but you
<v Speaker 1>get a ton of rocks, do you know? Again? But
<v Speaker 1>I want to move on to silica, but I don't
<v Speaker 1>want to forget this either. Why regarding limestone endemism, because
<v Speaker 1>you don't really get that with volcanic rocks, Like I
<v Speaker 1>don't know of any rhyolite endemics, But with limestone, there's
<v Speaker 1>a ton of plants that seem to have evolved a tolerance.
<v Speaker 1>Same kind of phenomenon with serpentine. It's like they need it,
<v Speaker 1>but they've evolved a tolerance to limestone and they have not.
<v Speaker 1>You know, whatever makes them able to tolerate limestone is
<v Speaker 1>not adaptive to them growing on volcanic soil. There's plenty
<v Speaker 1>of plants that grow on both, like okatillo, but there
<v Speaker 1>are plenty of plants that are really truly limestone endemics.
<v Speaker 1>Is that a chemical thing?
<v Speaker 2>Is it? Just?
<v Speaker 1>Is it? Calcium is hard for plant? What is it? Yeah?
<v Speaker 2>I'm gonna, I'm gonna. I'm gonna suggest a couple of things.
<v Speaker 2>So I'm not a I'm not a soil scientist, but
<v Speaker 2>but I can definitely tell you that the composition of
<v Speaker 2>a volcanic rock is much more complicated and diverse than
<v Speaker 2>the composition of a limestone. Limestone really is is ninety
<v Speaker 2>at least ninety five percent calcium carbonate. So again, if
<v Speaker 2>a plant needs potassium, there's gonna be a little bit
<v Speaker 2>of potassium in there. If it needs sodium, it's probably
<v Speaker 2>a little bit. But if it needs other things, there's
<v Speaker 2>not much else there. It's pretty Yeah, it's a it's
<v Speaker 2>sort of a you know, a very simple chemical rock.
<v Speaker 2>Volcanic rock has whatever a plant needs, its gonna have potassium, sodium,
<v Speaker 2>you know, whatever else it needs. And so I think
<v Speaker 2>that's one of the reasons volcanic soils are so rich
<v Speaker 2>compared to compared to a limestone. The other the other
<v Speaker 2>thing that would stress a plan out, in addition to
<v Speaker 2>it not having a lot of you know, chemical diversity,
<v Speaker 2>is that the limestone things tend to produce alkaline pH conditions,
<v Speaker 2>so high pH soils, and so you probably need a
<v Speaker 2>very special plant that can tolerate high calcium and high
<v Speaker 2>pH in their soil. And that you know that that
<v Speaker 2>takes a special kind of plant.
<v Speaker 1>That takes a little bit of tweaking of natural selection
<v Speaker 1>and evolution. Yeah, sat I mean again, I don't think
<v Speaker 1>anyone's actually studied this. I've looked for papers on this
<v Speaker 1>before I have not found any. But you know, spitballing works.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, you're a geologist, you know the chemistry. It's
<v Speaker 1>I mean, yeah, and you know you seem to know
<v Speaker 1>about a dapic endemism. So I'll take that. That's good.
<v Speaker 1>That's a good answer.
<v Speaker 2>But you know, here, I'll tell you something. When I'm
<v Speaker 2>in college, you know, I had to take like everybody,
<v Speaker 2>well not like everybody, but at University of Florida where
<v Speaker 2>I went, you had to take a biological two biological
<v Speaker 2>science classes. I took one on food science I don't
<v Speaker 2>know if you can tell, and the other one I
<v Speaker 2>took because I didn't want to take a biology class.
<v Speaker 2>I just wanted to take cool stuff that sounded fun
<v Speaker 2>and you could get your biology credit through food science.
<v Speaker 2>And then I also took one called Local Flora and
<v Speaker 2>so that was one of my favorite classes ever, where
<v Speaker 2>we hopped in a van on a Saturday, and this
<v Speaker 2>sort of eccentric old botany professor would take us out
<v Speaker 2>in the Florida Woods, the North Florida Woods, and we
<v Speaker 2>every every Saturday we'd learn like twenty, you know, twenty plants,
<v Speaker 2>and he took us a variety of different habitats and
<v Speaker 2>you know, so it's just that one little class.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that sounds great.
<v Speaker 2>It was really awesome. And then we'd have every week
<v Speaker 2>we'd have a quiz on the plants we learned. We'd
<v Speaker 2>collect plants and make like little plant collections and wax
<v Speaker 2>paper and learn all these plants. And I still remember,
<v Speaker 2>you know, polypodium polypo, the resurrection fern, and what was
<v Speaker 2>the toothache tree, xantox and clava hercules.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. I got a friend who's that she's a botanist
<v Speaker 1>in North Florida, and I've she's taken me out a
<v Speaker 1>couple of times. There's a wealth of plant diversity and
<v Speaker 1>a ton of endemics in that habitat too.
<v Speaker 2>It's oh yeah, and it's a lot of it's limestone bedrocks,
<v Speaker 2>so you know, there's a lot of weird stuff in there.
<v Speaker 2>But maybe I'm just trying to I might just be
<v Speaker 2>trying to impress you by rattling up.
<v Speaker 1>Well it's worked, sir, you impressed me a long time ago. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>all right, so ready to talk about silica rocks? About
<v Speaker 1>silica rich sedimentary rocks. So you know, there's radiolarian shirt,
<v Speaker 1>which is radiolaria. It's kind of the same principle as cocoa,
<v Speaker 1>lithophores and limestone. Right, these single celled organisms that these
<v Speaker 1>free floating plankton that build their shells out of silica
<v Speaker 1>because there's silica dissolved in ocean water as well, and
<v Speaker 1>they can form radiolarian shirt like you'll see, you know
<v Speaker 1>in the Franciscan Complex rocks up in the Bay Area.
<v Speaker 1>That's like typical Bay Area geology class one on one.
<v Speaker 1>But there's a lot of silica silica silica rich sedimentary
<v Speaker 1>rocks that were formed in oceans as well. Right, what
<v Speaker 1>exactly is going on there? And how does that what's
<v Speaker 1>causing that?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so at the on the ocean floor, the model
<v Speaker 2>is that layers of silica are yeah, the accumulated skeletons
<v Speaker 2>of of as you say, radularia, I think dietoms as well.
<v Speaker 2>Are those delicious? Yeah yeah, yeah, and uh yeah, and
<v Speaker 2>they extract SO two from ocean water, which is really
<v Speaker 2>weird because you know, we don't think of s IO
<v Speaker 2>two being particularly soluble in water. Right, If you were
<v Speaker 2>to take quartz sand, for example, which is SOO two uh,
<v Speaker 2>and you put it in a cup on your on
<v Speaker 2>your desk. That sand is going to stay there for
<v Speaker 2>the rest of your life. In the water, right, it's.
<v Speaker 1>Certainly not as soluble as limestone, yes, nowhere, But those
<v Speaker 1>rocks are weathering, like if you've got a big mountain
<v Speaker 1>of granite uplifted their weathering, right, it's not just mechanical weather.
<v Speaker 1>There's actual like hydrolysis going on there.
<v Speaker 2>Too or what absolutely oh yeah, yeah yeah. And in fact,
<v Speaker 2>that's where you know, this is a fun concept in
<v Speaker 2>geology geology for me, which is, you know, the ocean
<v Speaker 2>is not pure water, so therefore where does all the
<v Speaker 2>chemistry of the ocean come from? And as you say,
<v Speaker 2>it all comes from the weathering of rocks and all
<v Speaker 2>that chemistry that's brought in through rivers into the ocean.
<v Speaker 2>And so that's s O two And in the ocean
<v Speaker 2>most likely came from from weathering of granite or something.
<v Speaker 1>So the ocean, the ocean's like literally a stone soup
<v Speaker 1>in a way.
<v Speaker 2>There you go, yeah, absolutely.
<v Speaker 1>So with limestone it would be its carbonation. Then like
<v Speaker 1>when limestone is being chemically weathered it's carbonation and then
<v Speaker 1>that's being washed into the oceans.
<v Speaker 2>Or what carbonation means you're in the geology world, carbonation
<v Speaker 2>means we're adding CO two to a rock so to
<v Speaker 2>make limestone. So's it would actually the opposite that we
<v Speaker 2>would carbon limestone becomes decarbonated and it sends some of
<v Speaker 2>the CO two actually goes into the atmosphere. When you
<v Speaker 2>dissolve limestone and the sea, the calcium goes into the
<v Speaker 2>into the oceans.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, but there's there's carbon going into the oceans though, too, right,
<v Speaker 1>I mean you get the whole absolutely carbon silica cycle.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, okay, yeah, I mean that where's that that carbon
<v Speaker 2>is coming from. Some of it's dissolved and of course
<v Speaker 2>you know water and rain water, some of it comes
<v Speaker 2>from the atmosphere, right, so CO two will dissolve directly
<v Speaker 2>into the into the ocean from the atmosphere it comes.
<v Speaker 2>This carbon also comes from organic material, dead plants that
<v Speaker 2>get washed into the ocean. You know. Now we're talking
<v Speaker 2>about the carbon cycle. That's a very complicated, right, right,
<v Speaker 2>that's a complicated process.
<v Speaker 1>But there's bicarbonate going into the ocean. Is is any
<v Speaker 1>of that by carbonates coming from the limestone rock as well.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely absolutely.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, Okay, I sorry to get distracted. Let's go back
<v Speaker 1>to silica.
<v Speaker 2>Then, so okay, so silica, So the silica is in
<v Speaker 2>solution in the ocean, h and yeah, you have these
<v Speaker 2>animals that are able to extract that silica somehow through
<v Speaker 2>the miracle of biology and make a skeleton out of it.
<v Speaker 2>And once it does that, that SiO two is going
<v Speaker 2>to be awfully insoluble in the ocean, and so it's
<v Speaker 2>going to be there forever and it settles down to
<v Speaker 2>the seafloor and forms these layers. And you know you
<v Speaker 2>mentioned earlier about calcium, the carbonate compensation depth, the c
<v Speaker 2>CD as they call it, which means that below a
<v Speaker 2>certain depth, calcite and carbonate minerals actually become soluble. And
<v Speaker 2>in that region of the ocean, and that that's of
<v Speaker 2>the ocean, you're going to get more solicious layers, these
<v Speaker 2>silica layers, because a lot of the carbonates can't precipitate
<v Speaker 2>as they dissolve. So that's that's part of why you
<v Speaker 2>get these shirt layers, shirt being a solicit rock layer
<v Speaker 2>at the bottom of the ocean.
<v Speaker 1>So but when you see those. You know, if you
<v Speaker 1>know it's a marine rack, a marine sedimentary rack, and
<v Speaker 1>it's true, you could generally assume it's a deeper ocean
<v Speaker 1>rock or what like, it was formed in a deeper
<v Speaker 1>environment than like is that why we say limestone generally
<v Speaker 1>forms in shallow seas and shirt is a is a
<v Speaker 1>deeper rock or what?
<v Speaker 2>Correct? That's that's the basic idea. And you know there'll
<v Speaker 2>be you know, you'll have carbonate geologists in Texas that
<v Speaker 2>know a lot more about this than me. But but
<v Speaker 2>but the basic idea is carbonate rocks tend to form
<v Speaker 2>in shallow areas. The churt beds tend to be deeper,
<v Speaker 2>deeper parts of the ocean, like you know, two kilometers deep,
<v Speaker 2>those kinds of things. Carbonates form on continental shelves like
<v Speaker 2>the Bahamas right the modern day. The classic example of
<v Speaker 2>a carbonate platform is the Bahamas and the Florida Keys.
<v Speaker 2>Those are all pretty shallow. When I say shallow, I
<v Speaker 2>mean like up to you know, a few hundred uh
<v Speaker 2>you know, meters and and that and where calcite can
<v Speaker 2>actually potate. Calcite is you know, well, once you get it,
<v Speaker 2>it will precipitate it won't dissolve again. But in the
<v Speaker 2>deep ocean below the carbonate compensation depth, it's harder to
<v Speaker 2>participitate these carbonate minerals. So often what happens is the
<v Speaker 2>silicate MUDs will dominate down there, like the shirts and
<v Speaker 2>also just like you know, shales and things like that,
<v Speaker 2>which are also silicate materials.
<v Speaker 1>But the prince, I mean, the principle is the same.
<v Speaker 1>It's just this stuff raining down consistently over long amounts
<v Speaker 1>of time, in forming this deep mud that later then lithified.
<v Speaker 1>How does it end up how does it end up lithifying?
<v Speaker 1>I mean, it's just just the pressure or is there
<v Speaker 1>temperature involved too, or what?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah? Well both so you know, you know, remember going
<v Speaker 2>back to the analogy of thinking of dust building up
<v Speaker 2>on your car and your room. You know, let's let's
<v Speaker 2>give it like a millimeter a year, right, and then
<v Speaker 2>let's extrapolate that over one hundred million years, you're going
<v Speaker 2>to get you know, ten twenty kilometer thicks elements that
<v Speaker 2>are forming down at the bottom of the ocean. And
<v Speaker 2>the thing is, when you start to get these layers,
<v Speaker 2>they the depth at the bottom of those layers it increases.
<v Speaker 2>And anytime you do that that's going to increase the temperature,
<v Speaker 2>so we're getting the earth those lower layers. Lower layers
<v Speaker 2>will warm up a little bit. They're going to become pressurized.
<v Speaker 2>And one thing about adding pressure is that makes most
<v Speaker 2>minerals a little They're going to sort of dissolve and
<v Speaker 2>kind of glue themselves together a little bit better. They're
<v Speaker 2>going to be hotter, so you know they're going to
<v Speaker 2>also glue themselves together. All the sediments will become lithified
<v Speaker 2>or glued together at the higher pressure in temperatures for sure.
<v Speaker 1>And so when you see those lines like in limestone,
<v Speaker 1>like indicating the betting plane, what is the change? What
<v Speaker 1>causes those change up in lines? Times it's just suddenly
<v Speaker 1>a different depositional environment or a different chemistry or what
<v Speaker 1>causes yea, what makes those visible bedding planes?
<v Speaker 2>So like oh, you mean, like, so you're standing in
<v Speaker 2>front of an outcrop of limestones and you see one
<v Speaker 2>layer that's say a meter thick, and then another one
<v Speaker 2>that's thinner.
<v Speaker 1>And yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, and one might be red
<v Speaker 1>you know, like it's got iron in it. Like what's
<v Speaker 1>going on there?
<v Speaker 2>Well, any number of things, so you know, anything you
<v Speaker 2>can imagine that, like like you could get a change
<v Speaker 2>in you know, the composition of the oceans. Maybe there's
<v Speaker 2>maybe there's uplift of mountains nearby that's emptying a little
<v Speaker 2>bit more iron into the water or something, or or
<v Speaker 2>more rivers become more active because of uplift and they're
<v Speaker 2>emptying more organic material that makes the rocks a little darker.
<v Speaker 2>You could get global climate change that could make things warmer,
<v Speaker 2>and different species in a reef could form all kinds
<v Speaker 2>of things.
<v Speaker 1>All this stuff is recorded in a fucking road cut.
<v Speaker 1>It's amazing. John McPhee said, road cuts are church. The
<v Speaker 1>geologist the wasn't He wasn't lying. So do you think
<v Speaker 1>I mean, because I've heard before too that there was
<v Speaker 1>a theory for a while that, you know, around the
<v Speaker 1>Oligas scene Miocene, like thirty million years ago, the planet
<v Speaker 1>started to cool compared to what it had been because
<v Speaker 1>there was more CO two being sequestered and removed from
<v Speaker 1>the atmosphere. And I've heard theories that based that on
<v Speaker 1>the uplift of the Himalayas, because you have all this
<v Speaker 1>rock being uplifted and chemically weathering and more carbon then
<v Speaker 1>being locked up in oceans. Do you buy that at all,
<v Speaker 1>or what do you do you think that may have
<v Speaker 1>had a rollin in or what.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know how much debate there is over that
<v Speaker 2>kind of a theory, but I love those kinds of things,
<v Speaker 2>right because we're these are like global effects based on
<v Speaker 2>plate tectonic motions, and I imagine what happened in the Himalayas.
<v Speaker 2>There's a lot of you know, as we talked about before,
<v Speaker 2>when you have tectonic activity, you're uplifting rocks to the surface,
<v Speaker 2>and you need tectonic activities for that to happen. And
<v Speaker 2>what you're doing is you're bringing rocks to the surface
<v Speaker 2>that are not stable at the surface. Right, So like
<v Speaker 2>a lot of peridotites, for example, you know, and if
<v Speaker 2>if I happen to know there is a fair amount
<v Speaker 2>of serpentinites in the Himalayas, if you bring a peridotite
<v Speaker 2>to the surface, it's going to be unstable. It's gonna
<v Speaker 2>absorb water, and it's also gonna absorb CO two. So
<v Speaker 2>there's a lot of carbon sequestration, carbon capture research that's
<v Speaker 2>been done recently on serpentinites and their ability to absorb
<v Speaker 2>CO two. So if you bring all these peridotypes and
<v Speaker 2>serpentinite to the surface. In a mountain building episode, you're
<v Speaker 2>gonna have this giant CO two sponge that just got absorbed,
<v Speaker 2>and yeah, maybe maybe that could happen.
<v Speaker 1>How did wait, how does peridotite in serpentinite absorb ZEO two?
<v Speaker 2>That's crazy, Well, sir pentinite, if you add CO two
<v Speaker 2>to serpentinite, it reacts to form the mineral. I believe
<v Speaker 2>it forms talc and in the are called magnus site,
<v Speaker 2>and magnusite is a magnesum carbonate mineral. So the carbonate
<v Speaker 2>the CO two gets sucked into sir pentonite, it metamorphoses
<v Speaker 2>into talc plus a new carbonate mineral called mendusite.
<v Speaker 1>And then literally is locked the way in a rock.
<v Speaker 2>And it's locked the way in a rock. That's right
<v Speaker 2>until you dissolve it again in rain water. Okay, it's
<v Speaker 2>not forever.
<v Speaker 1>Nothing is forever. Not even diamonds are forever.
<v Speaker 2>Not even diamonds.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, So we talked to go back to sir pentanide
<v Speaker 1>for a minute, and then I want to move on
<v Speaker 1>to gypsum and then we can start to wrap this up.
<v Speaker 1>But sirpentanite has this asbestos in it, right, it's got
<v Speaker 1>You could see that kind of like shearing. It looks
<v Speaker 1>like the rock was compressed and then you know kind
<v Speaker 1>of like you held it in between your hands and
<v Speaker 1>you know, made that like you're a you know that
<v Speaker 1>motion like you're you're about to spin a fire with
<v Speaker 1>your hands, right and imagine it's correct me if I'm wrong,
<v Speaker 1>But you got a rock in there or a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of mass in there, and you press it, you know,
<v Speaker 1>but with exponential force and then shear it, you know,
<v Speaker 1>like that one hand goes towards your chest, the other
<v Speaker 1>goes out. Is that kind I mean? Is that what's
<v Speaker 1>happening to sir pentonite when it's formed? And is that
<v Speaker 1>what causes that kind of chrisotile asbestos formation or what?
<v Speaker 1>What is that?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah? So serpentonites often have all these these shearing forces
<v Speaker 2>associated with them, and they don't they're not very good
<v Speaker 2>at resisting shearing sharing. Is that motion you're talking about,
<v Speaker 2>like when your hands slide past each other, right?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah?
<v Speaker 2>Uh, they tend to crumble up when you do that,
<v Speaker 2>and so that that's a good It's an important and
<v Speaker 2>common characteristic of serpentinite outcrops is that they're highly sheared,
<v Speaker 2>highly broken up. The asbestos what you're talking about there,
<v Speaker 2>there's a mineral called chrysotile, and it forms asbestos in veins.
<v Speaker 2>So veins are like these cracks in rocks to get
<v Speaker 2>filled up with minerals.
<v Speaker 1>Right, So that's another mispronunciation of mine. Okay, you know
<v Speaker 1>the crisis tile stuff over there.
<v Speaker 2>You keep your pronunciation, thank you.
<v Speaker 1>But I've seen it. I mean I've seen like on
<v Speaker 1>the fucking beach in Big Sur where there's an entire
<v Speaker 1>hillside composed of like the most beautiful color green asbestos,
<v Speaker 1>like right on the ocean. It's fucking hilarious, but it's sorry,
<v Speaker 1>go on, So what's how does this form? Yeah?
<v Speaker 2>So yeah, So when we say the mineral serpentine, that's
<v Speaker 2>actually that's a generalization. There's actually several different types of
<v Speaker 2>serpentine minerals. It's actually a family of minerals. There's one
<v Speaker 2>called lizardite, which is sort of this massive stuff that
<v Speaker 2>doesn't make asbestos. There's one called antigerite, which is a
<v Speaker 2>very high temperature form that forms like in a subduction zone.
<v Speaker 2>And then there's this one called chrysotel and chrysotile tends
<v Speaker 2>to form in these veins, and that's where the asbestos
<v Speaker 2>comes from. And it should be said, by the way,
<v Speaker 2>that it's not the most dangerous form of asbestos. Now
<v Speaker 2>I'm not a medical doctor, so I'm not saying anyone
<v Speaker 2>should breathe.
<v Speaker 1>Don't go doing lines of it, don't go don't short lines.
<v Speaker 2>Like you should. You should avoid it, don't like you know,
<v Speaker 2>it's still it's still dangerous. But the really bad stuff
<v Speaker 2>is it comes from a mineral called amphibol. That's the
<v Speaker 2>stuff that really causes the most severe forms of mesothelium
<v Speaker 2>or that's the really bad stuff. But that said, you
<v Speaker 2>know again, please no listener, you know, don't don't don't
<v Speaker 2>feel like you can build your house with chrysotile asbestos.
<v Speaker 2>Please don't do that. But but chrystotil forms in these
<v Speaker 2>tends to form in veins. So if you go to
<v Speaker 2>a serpentinite outcrop, you'll see these like white lines or
<v Speaker 2>green lines that penetrate the sir pentonite. Those are probably
<v Speaker 2>crystotile asbestos veins, and not always it doesn't have to be,
<v Speaker 2>but that's most the most common way, and chrysotile, the
<v Speaker 2>mineral crystotile forms these little. What it is is it
<v Speaker 2>actually forms these layers of silica and magnesium and they
<v Speaker 2>curl up and they curl up into these these microscopic fibers.
<v Speaker 2>And that's what asbestos is, is these curled up layers
<v Speaker 2>of magnesium and silicon and crys otil will do that
<v Speaker 2>because of the way that the mineral forms. We don't
<v Speaker 2>need to go into that in any more detail than that.
<v Speaker 1>But so what happens when you when you breathe a
<v Speaker 1>bunch of this stuff in it gets lodged in your
<v Speaker 1>lung and then your lung kind of nodulates around that.
<v Speaker 2>Or what I imagine that's what it is. I don't
<v Speaker 2>quite know the you know, the physiology, but but I
<v Speaker 2>imagine that it gets lodged in your lung and you're
<v Speaker 2>and it's insoluble, it's not once it's there, it's not
<v Speaker 2>going anywhere, and it's microscopic, right, so so you probably
<v Speaker 2>can't even see it and how do you even get
<v Speaker 2>it out? And it's really bad news. And so your
<v Speaker 2>your your lungs are going to respond very poorly to that.
<v Speaker 2>They're just gonna get stuck in there. That's not that's
<v Speaker 2>not good.
<v Speaker 1>So what what's so what's up with silicosis? Then, like
<v Speaker 1>if you're because I say, the people horticulture lists that
<v Speaker 1>get big bags of pearlide or something, that's another concern
<v Speaker 1>they have to worry about it.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so you don't, you don't need you know, if
<v Speaker 2>you breathe in something, it doesn't have to be asbestos
<v Speaker 2>to get lodging your lung and cause problems. You can
<v Speaker 2>just have ground up rock dust and if that stuff
<v Speaker 2>gets in your lungs, right, then that's not that's actually
<v Speaker 2>actually a hazard. I've been starting to think a little
<v Speaker 2>bit more about I go cut rocks. You know, I've
<v Speaker 2>cut a lot of rocks in my day, and you
<v Speaker 2>should probably wear when anytime you cut a rock, you
<v Speaker 2>should wear a face mask to prevent particulates from you know.
<v Speaker 2>It's it's more, it's like most medical things. It's like
<v Speaker 2>it's about long term exposure rates. Right, So yeah, one
<v Speaker 2>time it's probably okay, But if you're breathing in rock
<v Speaker 2>dust for years on end, schlepping you know, bags of
<v Speaker 2>pear light at a horridic culture shop, that could be
<v Speaker 2>a hazard. You know.
<v Speaker 1>Oh god, yeah, so you mentioned so you mentioned cutting rocks,
<v Speaker 1>So what are you doing there are you looking? Are
<v Speaker 1>you producing those nice images of all the different minerals.
<v Speaker 1>It looks like a mosaic, like some sort of piece
<v Speaker 1>of abstract arc when you do that, like you cut
<v Speaker 1>these things up and then you look at the microscopically,
<v Speaker 1>what's going on?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, all kinds of things. I mean, we cut rocks
<v Speaker 2>to make what we call thin sections, which are these
<v Speaker 2>little microscopic slides. They're there. If you cut a rock
<v Speaker 2>really really thin to about you know, any you know, ten,
<v Speaker 2>a few tens of microns thin, you can actually see
<v Speaker 2>through it. It's so thin, like that's the thickness of
<v Speaker 2>a human hair. And when you do that, you can
<v Speaker 2>put it under a special kind of microscope called a
<v Speaker 2>polarizing microscope, and you can see all kinds of things
<v Speaker 2>in the rock. It's it's a it's a lot of
<v Speaker 2>fun and uh and you can learn what minerals are there.
<v Speaker 2>You can look at how the minerals are interacting with
<v Speaker 2>each other. You can get a lot of information microscopically.
<v Speaker 2>We also cut rocks to make polished sections that we
<v Speaker 2>put in a scanning electron microscope that helps us identify
<v Speaker 2>features in the rock. Sometimes we just cut rocks up
<v Speaker 2>to to make small chips to send off the laboratories
<v Speaker 2>so they can be dissolved and they can analyze it
<v Speaker 2>for chemistry. There's all kinds of reasons we'd want to
<v Speaker 2>cut rocks, but there's it's just it's also very fun
<v Speaker 2>and it's very satisfying.
<v Speaker 1>But there's but there's I mean, regard there's a lot
<v Speaker 1>of information you can get when you slice these things
<v Speaker 1>up and start looking at them. Mineral constituents. Because I
<v Speaker 1>have a friend, a friend in Perth who's a geologist,
<v Speaker 1>and he's always posting these images of the really beautiful
<v Speaker 1>I mean, they could be like Walart, you know, of
<v Speaker 1>what I presume are just yeah, the same thing, just
<v Speaker 1>cross sections of a rock and then you know, just magnified.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, that's right. He posts these beautiful sections. He
<v Speaker 2>posts the sections. He posts what we call reflected light sections,
<v Speaker 2>which are that's when light doesn't pass through but it
<v Speaker 2>reflects back. And so yeah, he does a great job
<v Speaker 2>doing this.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, he's cool. We got Peacha together once in Perth
<v Speaker 1>like five years ago and hung out. We were walking
<v Speaker 1>around downtown and he's like explaining the geology of these
<v Speaker 1>you know, the facades of these skyscrapers because they use
<v Speaker 1>you know, like sections of granite for like the lower
<v Speaker 1>facade of these fancy skyscrapers. He was like, tell me
<v Speaker 1>how this stuff is formed. I'm like, holy shit, man,
<v Speaker 1>we're just like we're like after hours in this downtown
<v Speaker 1>business district. And he was stall and like rabid with
<v Speaker 1>like fascination and excitement that it was really fun.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. I dm with him periodically. He'll send me you know,
<v Speaker 2>he likes to challenge people who identify minerals, but he'll
<v Speaker 2>look like these these ridiculously obscure minerals that no one
<v Speaker 2>can identify, and especially from a picture, right, So this
<v Speaker 2>is like it's all email. I was like, dude, you're
<v Speaker 2>just trolling us. There's no way to get so.
<v Speaker 1>How is he doing that? Like what magnification is that?
<v Speaker 1>That's just a sliced rock magnified? How how many times
<v Speaker 1>roughly on can you tell?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, that's it's probably going to be magnetized, like you know, magnified.
<v Speaker 2>You know, probably you're looking at pictures that are probably
<v Speaker 2>like five millimeters across something like that depends on you know,
<v Speaker 2>it's a microscope, so you can change the magnification, but
<v Speaker 2>most of them are probably in low magnification on a microscope,
<v Speaker 2>which means like the images you see on Instagram are
<v Speaker 2>probably a few millimeters across.
<v Speaker 1>Let's do it like that. Yeah, yeah, okay, cool? All right,
<v Speaker 1>Well I want to I want to talk about rylight
<v Speaker 1>a little bit more too. I've noticed, you know, like
<v Speaker 1>it plays like the chiracawas in southern Arizona or especially
<v Speaker 1>out here by Fort Davis in West Texas. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it's a lot of rhyolite. It's a lot of you know,
<v Speaker 1>thirty million year old roughly thirty million year old volcanism,
<v Speaker 1>and it forms these hoodoo formations. Right, Why does it
<v Speaker 1>do that? I mean they're phenomenal. They look really cool.
<v Speaker 1>There's all these nooks and crannies you can get up in.
<v Speaker 1>Must have been a great place to hide, you know,
<v Speaker 1>during some of the wars with the Native Americans and
<v Speaker 1>you know US cavalry back in the day. What causes
<v Speaker 1>rhyolite to do that?
<v Speaker 2>Well, I mean they are beautiful, and that's why we
<v Speaker 2>make national parks and monuments out of them, right, So,
<v Speaker 2>you know, Cheercowa National Monument, Bandalier National Line is another one.
<v Speaker 2>So the reason they do that is again there's sort
<v Speaker 2>of rhyelites seem to have the sweet spot between being irrodable,
<v Speaker 2>yet they hold together well. Right, So therefore when you
<v Speaker 2>get you know, water and wind and you know, and
<v Speaker 2>things like that weather and eroad the surface, the whole
<v Speaker 2>thing doesn't just crumble away. It actually has enough coherence
<v Speaker 2>to stay a cliff even though you can carve out
<v Speaker 2>these these deep cracks and caves in the side. They
<v Speaker 2>have a very unique way of weathering because of that.
<v Speaker 2>So that's that's that's I think that's it's sort of like,
<v Speaker 2>you know, we're talking about the sweet spot for bad
<v Speaker 2>Lands National Park, right, it's another one of these sweet
<v Speaker 2>spot kind of things. And it's because of that they
<v Speaker 2>have a very distinctive, distinctive weathering. I mean, I can
<v Speaker 2>not always the case, but it's it's fairly common. If
<v Speaker 2>someone shows me a picture of a rock, I'll be like,
<v Speaker 2>that looks like rhyolite just from the way that it's weathering.
<v Speaker 1>Right, right, But how does this stuff form though? I mean,
<v Speaker 1>like in the you know that was what is it
<v Speaker 1>Turkey Creek? I must want to say Turkey Neck, the
<v Speaker 1>Turkey Creek volcanic event in in southern Arizona thirty million
<v Speaker 1>years ago? Is that so? Is that all that rhyolite
<v Speaker 1>like those fours of this year of Cowas? Is that all?
<v Speaker 1>Is that rock all the same age? Like it's in
<v Speaker 1>other words, it's not like limestone where it's it's you know,
<v Speaker 1>older on the bottom, younger on top, but it's all
<v Speaker 1>the same age. It's more like a you know, like
<v Speaker 1>the granite pluton that became the rock beneath Joshua Tree,
<v Speaker 1>Like it's all the same age.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, there could be there could be some minor
<v Speaker 2>amount of layering because you know, imagine a giant volcan
<v Speaker 2>like let's let's think about Yellowstone. So Yellowstone is a
<v Speaker 2>good modern rhyolite eruption, right, And if you look at
<v Speaker 2>a geologic map, you'll see, you know, a variety of
<v Speaker 2>volcanic flows that formed in the last save five million years.
<v Speaker 2>So it could be that these things at the bottom
<v Speaker 2>do have earlier flows from the same volcano. So, but
<v Speaker 2>the difference in age is going to be much shorter
<v Speaker 2>than say, you know, limestone beds in West Texas where
<v Speaker 2>you know, you had fifty million years to form or whatever,
<v Speaker 2>right or or like the Appalachian Plateau where you preserve
<v Speaker 2>you know, a couple hundred million years or whatever. You know.
<v Speaker 2>Rhyolite volcano, as with all volcanoes, tend to be relatively
<v Speaker 2>short lived, although they can have multiple flows within it.
<v Speaker 1>So but you might get like a forty foot section
<v Speaker 1>that's all the same age, like all that whole thing
<v Speaker 1>just and how does it It's just magma that just
<v Speaker 1>was puked out of this volcanic vent. I mean, I'm
<v Speaker 1>trying to think, like in the case of that eruption
<v Speaker 1>that caused that Shirakawa's Like, that was a massive eruption.
<v Speaker 1>From what I understand, what would it have looked like?
<v Speaker 1>I mean, just lava and ash falling down for a
<v Speaker 1>few days.
<v Speaker 2>It would have been terrifying. Yeah, So these are so
<v Speaker 2>the rylite volcanoes, the explosive ryolite volcanoes, that is, they
<v Speaker 2>tend to be the most violent eruptions. And you know
<v Speaker 2>the reason for that is because highlight it has two
<v Speaker 2>things going for it. Number one is it is very viscous,
<v Speaker 2>means it's very resistant to flowing. So it's sort of
<v Speaker 2>like it holds in pressure pretty well, but it still flows, right,
<v Speaker 2>So it's sort of like a you know, it's like
<v Speaker 2>a like the worst the worst cold you've ever had, right, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>big giant boogers in your nose. Right, So it's think
<v Speaker 2>of it like that, sort of like rhyolite will plug up,
<v Speaker 2>it will plug itself up, and that will allow a
<v Speaker 2>lot of pressure to build up. And the second thing
<v Speaker 2>about rhyolite, they tend to be pretty rich in water,
<v Speaker 2>and that water is going to is going to build
<v Speaker 2>up a lot of pressure. So it sort of holds
<v Speaker 2>its own pressure well, and then it has a lot
<v Speaker 2>of pressure forming from the water underneath it. So so
<v Speaker 2>it tends to form these really really extremely violent volcanic
<v Speaker 2>eruptions that that are that that are also high in volume, right,
<v Speaker 2>so you get a huge eruption and you can get
<v Speaker 2>you know, as you said, one eruption can can give
<v Speaker 2>you many meters thick volcanic flow and it's violent all
<v Speaker 2>the way down.
<v Speaker 1>Right. But and like compare with basalt, which I mean,
<v Speaker 1>if you've seen those videos of like the Hawaiian volcanoes
<v Speaker 1>Thurwing interruption, that basalt is moving like it is looks
<v Speaker 1>like a river of lava literally, So most so maybe
<v Speaker 1>most could you could say in the cinematic universe, most
<v Speaker 1>volcanoes are probably basalt, like in like a Star Wars whatever,
<v Speaker 1>the one where Anakin' is a fucking teenager or whatever
<v Speaker 1>right where he dies in a forgive me for using
<v Speaker 1>pop culture references, or like or like Mario Brothers. The
<v Speaker 1>lava and Mario Brothers is certainly basalt. It's not rhyolite, right, absolutely, absolutely,
<v Speaker 1>because it's actually flowing like a liquid, whereas it's so
<v Speaker 1>like I guess the smooth analogy I wanted to use,
<v Speaker 1>like if you make a shitty smooth you don't put
<v Speaker 1>enough water and liquid in there, it doesn't flow that well,
<v Speaker 1>it's chunky, whereas if you make it just perfectly right,
<v Speaker 1>it'll flow out when you pour it into the cup
<v Speaker 1>perfectly and.
<v Speaker 2>You're you're good with your food analogy.
<v Speaker 1>I've learned from a pro here. So, But and that's
<v Speaker 1>basically am I right in thinking that's mostly due to
<v Speaker 1>the silica content, right, like the basalt flow as well,
<v Speaker 1>because there's not as much silica as rhyolite.
<v Speaker 2>Correct so, And on a microscopic or a nanoscopic scale,
<v Speaker 2>what that means is the silica actually will form these polymers,
<v Speaker 2>these silica polymers in the in the lava flow, and
<v Speaker 2>the polymers are not as long in a basaltic flow
<v Speaker 2>as they are in rhyolite flow.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, okay, so that may Yeah, that makes sense. So
<v Speaker 1>like lava tubes, that's probably basalt too, when you get
<v Speaker 1>a lava cave.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Absolutely. Now there's an exception of this that you know.
<v Speaker 2>There's a thing called a lava dome, and those are
<v Speaker 2>rhyolitic ryolytic volcanic eruptions, but they're very slow and and
<v Speaker 2>those are there's one there's a lava dome forming in
<v Speaker 2>the creator of Mount Saint Helens right now. I went
<v Speaker 2>to I saw one in Japan this last where I
<v Speaker 2>got to go there and there was a lava dome.
<v Speaker 2>We were maybe maybe five hundred yards from it watching
<v Speaker 2>it just sit there and smoke. So that's rhyolite. It's
<v Speaker 2>very slow and goofy, but it's not violent. So not
<v Speaker 2>all rhyolite is violent, but the biggest, most violent eruptions.
<v Speaker 1>Are rhyolites hashtag not all rhyolite. What so, what what's
<v Speaker 1>up with andesite then? Because andesites intermediate between basalt and
<v Speaker 1>rhyolite how can you even tell it sandysite, like just
<v Speaker 1>looking at the texture and how does it behave?
<v Speaker 2>Sure, so it is. It's an intermediate between the basalt
<v Speaker 2>and the rhyolite, absolutely, and they andecites tend to only
<v Speaker 2>form on those big stratovolcanoes. The maltfujis the Mount Saint
<v Speaker 2>Helen's And if you were to see them, the best
<v Speaker 2>way I can say to describe them, the andsites they
<v Speaker 2>tend to be. They're usually a little bit less dark
<v Speaker 2>than a basalt. They're a little bit lighter color, but
<v Speaker 2>they're still like a like a medium gray. But they're
<v Speaker 2>usually going to be filled with a lot of uh
<v Speaker 2>plagy e clays feldtz bar. That's a mineral that forms
<v Speaker 2>these little elongate white crystals to kind of you know,
<v Speaker 2>look like little white sticks or something in the magma.
<v Speaker 2>So you want to look for that. But also anti
<v Speaker 2>sites are going to have probably going to have things
<v Speaker 2>like dark minerals like buy titan hornblend in them. So
<v Speaker 2>I'm getting a little get a little more detailed than
<v Speaker 2>you need.
<v Speaker 1>No, that's good, that's good for the record, I want
<v Speaker 1>to Yeah. But regarding basalt though, I mean, you know,
<v Speaker 1>you go to places like Amboy in the Mojave Desert, right,
<v Speaker 1>like famous, that's like a basalt the crater really cool,
<v Speaker 1>the black rock, it's got little pores in it. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it's hard to go there and not take a fucking
<v Speaker 1>couple of rocks home with you, which I do all
<v Speaker 1>the time. I mean when I moved, like half the
<v Speaker 1>trailer was filled with rocks. But so with stuff like
<v Speaker 1>with that, like why would you get in the middle
<v Speaker 1>of the Mojave Desert and a mostly rhyolitic Well, well,
<v Speaker 1>the actually Amboy's younger too, there's like ten thousand young,
<v Speaker 1>that's right, very young. Where does that come from? Because
<v Speaker 1>it's it's was that not a subduction zone? Associate? Like
<v Speaker 1>was it not caused by subduction? Like what caused Amboy?
<v Speaker 1>And then on another note, you know one thousand miles
<v Speaker 1>to the north, the Columbia Gorge in Oregon, that's all right,
<v Speaker 1>where you've got a layer of basalt presumably all the
<v Speaker 1>same age, there's like three hundred feet thick. I'm just
<v Speaker 1>trying to imagine that. Like, let's start with Amboy, Like
<v Speaker 1>what what caused that to pop up? And it was
<v Speaker 1>pretty short lived I assume too.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, these are we call those monogenetic, which means
<v Speaker 2>one one mono meaning one genetic meaning formation. So that
<v Speaker 2>means that they're a single eruption. And it's done. It's
<v Speaker 2>one and done, and it's all throughout the Mohave Desert.
<v Speaker 2>There are all these monogenetic basaltic eruptions all over the
<v Speaker 2>place and they're all one and done. And the reason
<v Speaker 2>that you get them there is because as the crust
<v Speaker 2>in that part of the country, which is called the
<v Speaker 2>basin and range we talked about, is being pulled apart,
<v Speaker 2>and it's a continental rift, it's an incipient continental rift basically, right,
<v Speaker 2>So the crust is being pulled apart. That's why, as
<v Speaker 2>you say, Reno and Salt Lake are being separated. Now,
<v Speaker 2>when you pull the crust apart deep in the mantle,
<v Speaker 2>what that does is it lowers the pressure. Because you know,
<v Speaker 2>part of the reason we have pressure in the mantle,
<v Speaker 2>it's because of all the overlying rock layers, right, So
<v Speaker 2>if you start to pull those layers apart on the top,
<v Speaker 2>that puts a little bit less weight on the mantle below,
<v Speaker 2>and you get a drop in pressure and we call
<v Speaker 2>that decompression. Wow, all right, you're following me.
<v Speaker 1>I see, I see what's going on. So this stuff
<v Speaker 1>is becoming more buoyant, and.
<v Speaker 2>Well, what actually happens, Well, it's becoming right, it's going
<v Speaker 2>to be easier for it to rise because there's less
<v Speaker 2>weight pushing down. But what actually happens, and this is
<v Speaker 2>this is you know, we'll stop here at this level
<v Speaker 2>of detail, but when you decompress, when you lower the
<v Speaker 2>pressure on the mantle, it will melt.
<v Speaker 1>Oh right, okay, you get so you're are you lowering
<v Speaker 1>the melting point?
<v Speaker 2>Then correct, You're lowering the melting point by decompressing the
<v Speaker 2>magma and so, and the decompression comes because the plates
<v Speaker 2>are being pulled apart and there's less weight on the mantle,
<v Speaker 2>so you lower, so the pressure goes down and the
<v Speaker 2>rocks will melt. Wow. So in every place on Earth
<v Speaker 2>where the crust is being pulled apart, you're going to
<v Speaker 2>get these little volcanoes pop up because of what we
<v Speaker 2>call decompression melting down in the mantlet.
<v Speaker 1>No, God, that's your blowing my mind. Fuck, because I've
<v Speaker 1>seen this in northeastern California too. There was a spot
<v Speaker 1>in Modoc County, which is also I guess tthnically the
<v Speaker 1>basin and range where there was a there's a rare
<v Speaker 1>cypress that grows at this spot called Timbered Crater, and
<v Speaker 1>I used to go there repeatedly and it was all
<v Speaker 1>basaltic magma and there were huge cracks in the ground
<v Speaker 1>and lava caves everywhere, and it looks pretty easily like
<v Speaker 1>ten thirty thousand years old.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I think, I think, what's going I have to
<v Speaker 2>go review the literature on that, but I think that
<v Speaker 2>is also decompression melting in what we call a back arc,
<v Speaker 2>which is the area behind the arc that's more subduction related.
<v Speaker 2>But it's sort of like a it's a hybrid but
<v Speaker 2>but yeah, but the same kind of a thing. That's
<v Speaker 2>that's more detail.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, well, it's like you know, yeah, I guess it
<v Speaker 1>is close to the h to the Cascades, to something that's.
<v Speaker 2>Right, it's right behind it. So when you get a
<v Speaker 2>when you get a subduction zone, you have the arc volcanoes,
<v Speaker 2>the main arc chain, but behind it you can actually
<v Speaker 2>get some spreading, which we call the back arc when
<v Speaker 2>you get some volcanoes back there.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, so moving up north for a little bit further
<v Speaker 1>north now to the Columbia River course, what's going on there?
<v Speaker 1>Because for anyone who's not seen that, I mean, it's
<v Speaker 1>it's beautiful number one, I mean number two. It's like
<v Speaker 1>literally this huge, like three hundred four hundred foot thick
<v Speaker 1>chunk of basalt, this layer of basalt that extends for many,
<v Speaker 1>many miles.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, those are called the Columbia River flood basalts. So
<v Speaker 2>it's it's called a they're called flood basalts. And the
<v Speaker 2>reason their name that is because these are these eruptions
<v Speaker 2>that are so big and voluminous that they create, you know,
<v Speaker 2>mile thick eruptions, like super super thick. And so the
<v Speaker 2>reason we get those is because beneath the crust there's
<v Speaker 2>a giant rising blob of hot mantle rock, which we
<v Speaker 2>call a mantle plume. So you've probably heard of mantle
<v Speaker 2>plumes before. Yeah, yeah, okay, So a mantle plume. People
<v Speaker 2>imagine this to be magma, like a liquid thing. It's
<v Speaker 2>actually not. It's a hot it's just hot rock and
<v Speaker 2>it rises up from very deep and it takes like
<v Speaker 2>a billion years. Right, So somewhere deep in the mantle
<v Speaker 2>there's a hotter part of the mantle that makes that
<v Speaker 2>hotter part of the mantle has a lower density, so
<v Speaker 2>it's going to rise up through the surrounding rock. It's
<v Speaker 2>all rock, right. It takes a long time for this
<v Speaker 2>to happen, and eventually that hot rock, that hot mantle plume,
<v Speaker 2>just like a blob in a lava lamp. It's going
<v Speaker 2>to rise up and it's going to get close to
<v Speaker 2>the surface. When it gets close to the surface, it's
<v Speaker 2>going to melt and it's going to create volcanoes. But
<v Speaker 2>the mantle plume is so big that the melting creates
<v Speaker 2>these just absolutely enormous volcanic eruptions, and they're basaltic and
<v Speaker 2>they come out of the ground in a very short
<v Speaker 2>period of time. So we're talking like several kilometers of
<v Speaker 2>basaltic magma produced in like a few million years. And
<v Speaker 2>this has happened all over the world in different spots.
<v Speaker 2>There's a flood basalts in called the Siberian Traps. In Russia,
<v Speaker 2>there's the Decan Plateau. Yeah, exactly exactly, So these are
<v Speaker 2>that's right. People have linked these two extinctions because there's
<v Speaker 2>so much magma that comes out that it affects the
<v Speaker 2>atmosphere and so so that's like this this big head
<v Speaker 2>of a mantle plume, and it's it's a single event
<v Speaker 2>that happens, and and what's kind of neat about it
<v Speaker 2>is that that you get this big burst of lava
<v Speaker 2>at the beginning, but it still keeps going after that.
<v Speaker 2>There's like a trickle that comes after after that, and
<v Speaker 2>that trickle is what is becomes a hotspot volcano chain
<v Speaker 2>like Hawaii. Right, So Hawaii is the little chain of
<v Speaker 2>volcanoes and that's sort of like the tail end of
<v Speaker 2>a mantle plume after the big event of this flood basalt,
<v Speaker 2>and the hotspot trail goes all the way to Yellowstone today.
<v Speaker 2>So you can actually track the volcanoes from the Columbia
<v Speaker 2>River flood basalt all the way to where Yellowstone is today.
<v Speaker 2>And it's all related to the same mantle taxes.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, cool, Yeah, because I've seen that same model. You
<v Speaker 1>know where there's like a candle they hold a candle
<v Speaker 1>over a piece of paper. Yeah, and the candle stays put,
<v Speaker 1>but the piece of paper slowly moves and creating a
<v Speaker 1>trail of you know, burned not not Yeah, the paper
<v Speaker 1>is not close enough to burn it, but it's you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's blackened. But so that's the same. So that's basically
<v Speaker 1>the hot spot, the Yellowstone hotspot caused. That is the
<v Speaker 1>same mantle plume that caused the Columbia River Gorge.
<v Speaker 2>Correct, Correct, except the only difference, the main difference is
<v Speaker 2>that it's sort of like the tail end of it,
<v Speaker 2>the last gasp.
<v Speaker 1>Right, So Yellowstone hotspot is that? I mean that gets
<v Speaker 1>played up all the time. I feel like for media,
<v Speaker 1>you know, for clickbait, is that really something to worry about?
<v Speaker 1>Do you think?
<v Speaker 2>I mean, what timescale do you want to worry about? It? On?
<v Speaker 1>It? Right? Like it's going to happen this century? And
<v Speaker 1>just why? I mean, it's you know, I can't, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>what would that have? Would it be any worse than
<v Speaker 1>what created Columbia River Gorge?
<v Speaker 2>Oh? Way worse? Because the Columbia River Gorge is just
<v Speaker 2>a bunch of piddley basalts, right, they may be sick, right,
<v Speaker 2>thick stuff, and it would you know, they would you know,
<v Speaker 2>I'm not I don't want to belittle what would happen
<v Speaker 2>if you know, let's say, if a flood basalt erupted
<v Speaker 2>in Texas, most of Texas would be uninhabitable in a
<v Speaker 2>million years.
<v Speaker 1>Right, it's amazing.
<v Speaker 2>But but it's not going to affect like global climate,
<v Speaker 2>or it's not going to send ash right three thousand
<v Speaker 2>miles away. You know, like when Krakatoa erupted, you know
<v Speaker 2>there was like a volcanic winter or something, right, and
<v Speaker 2>you know that was not even a volcanic. That was
<v Speaker 2>small potatoes compared to a Yellowstone eruption, like when Yellowstone erupted,
<v Speaker 2>it's last eruption. Uh the you know the you know,
<v Speaker 2>when you go visit the National Park, you'll see signs
<v Speaker 2>that tell you that, you know, there was four inches
<v Speaker 2>of ash deposited in Iowa. You know that's like a
<v Speaker 2>thousand and fifteen hundred miles away. So you know, Yellowstone, Yellowstone.
<v Speaker 2>When Yellowstone erupts, it will blanket most of North America
<v Speaker 2>with ash, Like our roofs will cave in, right, It'll
<v Speaker 2>it'll block the sun for years. It'll be a problem.
<v Speaker 1>So this will be this will be like analogous to
<v Speaker 1>like the Decan traps.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, oh yeah, for sure. It'll be like a Cormack
<v Speaker 2>McCarthy bug.
<v Speaker 1>Shit. Wow, I should wow. Okay, so this is like
<v Speaker 1>this is actually a pretty big deal, but who knows
<v Speaker 1>when it could. It may not happen for fifty thousand years.
<v Speaker 1>When did it last happen?
<v Speaker 2>You know, I believe it was seven hundred million years ago. No, No,
<v Speaker 2>that's the Long Valley one. You know, I can't the last.
<v Speaker 2>So there's another. There's another one of these big ones
<v Speaker 2>in eastern California called the Long Valley called There, which
<v Speaker 2>is like Yellowstone's dangerous.
<v Speaker 1>I heard where's that?
<v Speaker 2>That's that's kind of near Oh you know, you know
<v Speaker 2>where Mono Lake is, like it's the society. Yeah, eastern
<v Speaker 2>eastern it's kind of New year smite, but on the eastern.
<v Speaker 1>Side of this year, right, yeah, yeah, Yeah, that's a
<v Speaker 1>great area.
<v Speaker 2>Man.
<v Speaker 1>That's yeah, Long Valley called there.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's wonderful.
<v Speaker 1>When did Yellowstone last the reupt I can look this up.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, six years ago? Yeah, forty.
<v Speaker 1>I was gonna say seven hundred million. That's that's like
<v Speaker 1>long it's you know, but six hundred and forty thousand. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that seems okay. Yeah, I'll get that.
<v Speaker 2>You know.
<v Speaker 1>I think I read about this. Yeah, that layer of
<v Speaker 1>ash in Iowa and probably took out a few species
<v Speaker 1>of megafauna.
<v Speaker 2>Probably did. Yeah, yeah, I mean that that will be bad.
<v Speaker 2>But I have I have a feeling that in order
<v Speaker 2>for something that big to erupt, we'll have like decades
<v Speaker 2>of warning, Like there's gonna be like all kinds of
<v Speaker 2>stuff happening, Like there'll be uplift on the land. The
<v Speaker 2>land will be will uplift and sort of booy up.
<v Speaker 2>There'll be a lot of earthquakes. There might even be
<v Speaker 2>the probably be more hot spring activity. Like you're not
<v Speaker 2>gonna be able to I's not something that big is
<v Speaker 2>not going to be like you know, oh I woke
<v Speaker 2>up and read the news today. It looks like Yellowstone.
<v Speaker 2>Now we have no power.
<v Speaker 1>You know, there'll be signs. So what causes these these
<v Speaker 1>huge mantle I mean it's just a massive lava slowly
<v Speaker 1>reaching the surface. And then I mean the Columbia River
<v Speaker 1>Gorge was tiny compared to any of these flood these
<v Speaker 1>like massive hot spot eruptions.
<v Speaker 2>Right, what you're talking you're comparing that to the Yellowstone eruption.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, like the flood, the basalt flow that created Columbia
<v Speaker 1>River Gorge was not really a mass. It wasn't a
<v Speaker 1>massive eruption. It was the same you know, it was Yellowstone,
<v Speaker 1>that body of magma that mapa plume, but it wasn't.
<v Speaker 2>Actually actually yellowstone. The actual surface expression of Yellowstone smaller
<v Speaker 2>than the surface expression of the Columbia River basalts. So
<v Speaker 2>those things cover you know, like the half the area
<v Speaker 2>of of you know, Oregon and Washington is covered by
<v Speaker 2>these flood basalts. It's a big area. But the difference
<v Speaker 2>is is that those volcanoes they are basalts more like Hawaii,
<v Speaker 2>so they're they're not these hugely explosive things that are
<v Speaker 2>going to send ash into the stratosphere like the Yellowstone eruption.
<v Speaker 1>That's right, less dangerous magma, whereas yellowstone would be rhyolite primarily.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, right, it's a rhyolitic eruption. It produces what we
<v Speaker 2>call a plinyun eruption p L I N I A N,
<v Speaker 2>which is the most dangerous explosive kind of volcanic eruption
<v Speaker 2>that has a huge, like like a mushroom cloud of
<v Speaker 2>ash and smoke that goes into the air and huge
<v Speaker 2>pyroclastic flows and just a really major global event. The
<v Speaker 2>reason that the Columbia River basalts are believed to be
<v Speaker 2>a major global event, it's not because an individual eruption
<v Speaker 2>was explosive, but because there was so much lava sustained
<v Speaker 2>over you know, over a few million years, that over
<v Speaker 2>time that would affect the atmosphere, like the Yellowstone would
<v Speaker 2>have affected the atmosphere in an instant. The Columbia River
<v Speaker 2>would have taken, you know, probably a few hundred thousand
<v Speaker 2>years for all the CO two or whatever that came
<v Speaker 2>out of there to build up and affect global climate.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. I mean, it's when you see them. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>when you see that rock and you realize it's everywhere.
<v Speaker 1>It's just it's such a massive amount of rock, you know,
<v Speaker 1>that the flood basalts in the Columbia River. I mean
<v Speaker 1>it's you know, and you yeah, just standing on that
<v Speaker 1>gorge and looking at the like Jesus Christ, it's like
<v Speaker 1>four hundred feet thick, and it goes for miles and
<v Speaker 1>it presumably goes, you know, God knows how far into
<v Speaker 1>the how many miles into the the land over there
<v Speaker 1>that I can't see on the other side of where
<v Speaker 1>it's been carved out from the water. You know.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's it's incredible. I've just been a little bit
<v Speaker 2>to the south of it. I've never I've never been
<v Speaker 2>in the Club River Gorge. That's something that needs to change.
<v Speaker 1>So anyway, I really appreciate you being down to do this.
<v Speaker 1>How did you how did you get into geology to
<v Speaker 1>begin with? Like, what what spurred your interest to Just
<v Speaker 1>because you've gone down a wormhole here, I mean, I
<v Speaker 1>can tell it's not just a job to you really
<v Speaker 1>love it. What got you into it?
<v Speaker 2>You know? I think? I mean, I think, like a
<v Speaker 2>lot of people, I just enjoyed the outdoors and uh,
<v Speaker 2>I just I couldn't tolerate going on a hike and
<v Speaker 2>not knowing what I was seeing, right, So that just
<v Speaker 2>sort of led to that kind of nerdy curiosity and uh,
<v Speaker 2>you know, in college, actually the first class I ever
<v Speaker 2>walked into was an intro physical geology class taught by
<v Speaker 2>a guy named Mike Purfeitt, who I'm still friends with today,
<v Speaker 2>who was a a very well known, uh sea floor geologist.
<v Speaker 2>He goes down and it looks at erupting volcanoes and submarines,
<v Speaker 2>that kind of a guy, And it was like it
<v Speaker 2>was a good you know, it was a great class.
<v Speaker 2>I really enjoyed the topic. I didn't change my major
<v Speaker 2>at the time. I still majored in geography because I
<v Speaker 2>really like maps, and also I just was more interested
<v Speaker 2>in in in you know, being a hipster scenister and
<v Speaker 2>playing in bands and and you know, being a music
<v Speaker 2>guy at the time. So but at some point I I,
<v Speaker 2>you know, I graduated, got my degree, and I realized
<v Speaker 2>I wasn't going to make a career out of music.
<v Speaker 2>So I was like, you know, I think I'd like
<v Speaker 2>go to grad school and scratch that geology itch, that
<v Speaker 2>sort of nature itch, and and here we are.
<v Speaker 1>But the itch got there from being able to see
<v Speaker 1>these things and getting exposure to them, to be you know,
<v Speaker 1>being able to go take a fucking hike up against
<v Speaker 1>a cool looking mountain and just having questions. I mean
<v Speaker 1>that curiosity. It's kind of the same thing that got
<v Speaker 1>out of plants, you know.
<v Speaker 2>I was just I mean, I remember I remember this vividly.
<v Speaker 2>There was a this is more botanical, you'll appreciate. It
<v Speaker 2>was probably a freshman in college, and my friends and
<v Speaker 2>I we went went on a backpacking trip in the
<v Speaker 2>Okaala National Forests. Have you heard of it? Yeah, And
<v Speaker 2>we went to this place called Hopkins Prairie, which is
<v Speaker 2>I think one of two federally designated wilderness areas in
<v Speaker 2>the in the forest and we're just sort of hanging out.
<v Speaker 2>And I remember wandering out by myself to this little
<v Speaker 2>wetland and just sitting down and I just started staring
<v Speaker 2>at all the plants. I noticed that, like, there was
<v Speaker 2>this one group of plants in this one spot, but
<v Speaker 2>then if you walk over, like, you know, ten feet,
<v Speaker 2>there'd be a totally different plant community, right, and something
<v Speaker 2>you see all the time, right, and so you know,
<v Speaker 2>and it just sort of hit me all these like
<v Speaker 2>natural variations that were surrounded by all the time. You know,
<v Speaker 2>I might have been a little high too, but you know,
<v Speaker 2>it helps.
<v Speaker 1>It certainly helps to envision this stuff.
<v Speaker 2>And you know, I you know, and that's that's an
<v Speaker 2>interesting area because there's a lot of plant life and
<v Speaker 2>it's a wetland in Florida, you know, it's that's that's
<v Speaker 2>what we do in Florida. We do wetlands really well.
<v Speaker 2>So it was just, you know, it just struck me
<v Speaker 2>as very very interesting and and uh and and then
<v Speaker 2>you know, I had I had a girlfriend in college.
<v Speaker 2>We would go do a lot of camping trips. We
<v Speaker 2>go to Big Bend and actually a couple of different
<v Speaker 2>girlfriends we would do that kind of stuff. So we
<v Speaker 2>did a lot of nature traveling all over and you know,
<v Speaker 2>just sort of built up and I was just like,
<v Speaker 2>you know, I like, I want to learn more about
<v Speaker 2>this stuff, and so so I did.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that was I remember if the one of the
<v Speaker 1>things that it's all about zooming out, and you know,
<v Speaker 1>literally like you have to think of it like zooming
<v Speaker 1>out like you're looking at a satellite map. You're just
<v Speaker 1>looking at your house. You zoom out a level, Suddenly
<v Speaker 1>you can see the town, zoom out a level you
<v Speaker 1>could see the general region, including the mountain range nearby,
<v Speaker 1>and then zoom further out and getting a bigger picture
<v Speaker 1>of how everything works around you. And for me it
<v Speaker 1>was I remember I was in Needles, California, and we
<v Speaker 1>were we were in this train yard. We were just
<v Speaker 1>getting hammered and we were like on the edge of
<v Speaker 1>this train yard. We would go and like draw on
<v Speaker 1>the cars with these little oil sticks when it came in.
<v Speaker 1>And I remember after, you know, we'd go do that.
<v Speaker 1>It was like fucking nine o'clock, ten o'clock at night,
<v Speaker 1>and I went, after drawing on these things, I went,
<v Speaker 1>I saw a van roll up and it was just
<v Speaker 1>a crew van dropping off the crew to get on
<v Speaker 1>the get on the train, and so but I freaked
<v Speaker 1>out and I ran. I might have been on mushrooms
<v Speaker 1>a little bit too, and I ran into this little
<v Speaker 1>like draw at the edge of a train yard because
<v Speaker 1>it's Needles, California is the fucking desert, and there was
<v Speaker 1>it was basically an arroyo that had been carved out,
<v Speaker 1>and so I was up against this wall and then
<v Speaker 1>I looked at the rock wall. It was a you know,
<v Speaker 1>natural rock wall, and it was composed of just layer
<v Speaker 1>after layer of alluvial deposits, you know, with these rounded
<v Speaker 1>pebbles in them. You know, probably each pebble sourced from
<v Speaker 1>a different mountain range thirty miles away, five miles away wherever.
<v Speaker 1>And I just started to realize that and picture everything,
<v Speaker 1>you know, I'm like, man, what the this is crazy?
<v Speaker 1>Like this rock I can see and I started thinking
<v Speaker 1>about the flash floods, that flash floods are just gradual
<v Speaker 1>event whatever that you know, layered these rocks there before
<v Speaker 1>it was carved out to ingraded to put a railroad
<v Speaker 1>yard in the middle. And it really started this is
<v Speaker 1>probably like fifteen years ago, and it started really hitting me,
<v Speaker 1>and I was like, oh, this is I'm kind of
<v Speaker 1>starting to see it. This is pretty cool. This is
<v Speaker 1>I want more of this, you know. I think the
<v Speaker 1>more you learn, the more hooked you get.
<v Speaker 2>You know. Yeah, and you know again, it's just about
<v Speaker 2>being aware of your surroundings and how what a rich,
<v Speaker 2>what a rich world we live in. You know. You
<v Speaker 2>know one thing that I'm I tell students like this,
<v Speaker 2>there's geology everywhere, right so, and this is true for
<v Speaker 2>plants too, And once you recognize that, there is no
<v Speaker 2>boring vacation destination, right so, like I don't care you
<v Speaker 2>put me anywhere on the planet. I'll know what the
<v Speaker 2>geology is. I'm going to look for the rocks. I'm
<v Speaker 2>going to look for the I'll look for the plants.
<v Speaker 2>And I want to know like what's what's what's the
<v Speaker 2>what's the climate there, what's the the atmospheric conditions? And
<v Speaker 2>you know, like you know, I think like someone would say,
<v Speaker 2>like I don't want to go to Kansas or something, right,
<v Speaker 2>I'm like, you don't want to go to Kansas? Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>there's cool stuff in Kansas, prairie grasses, the the you know,
<v Speaker 2>the geology there has this particular history and there's there's
<v Speaker 2>a you.
<v Speaker 1>Know, go to the Limestone in Kansas. Man, Holy yeah, absolutely,
<v Speaker 1>have a great time.
<v Speaker 2>You know, and and you know or like like you
<v Speaker 2>know Louisiana, like, oh, Louisiana is so flat, Like well,
<v Speaker 2>you know, there's a reason it's so flat, God damn it,
<v Speaker 2>because there's a friggin river depositing floodplains. You know, you
<v Speaker 2>go to the Mississippi Delta, the Yazi River plain, I mean,
<v Speaker 2>it's flat and it's just you know, it's boring and like, no,
<v Speaker 2>it isn't.
<v Speaker 1>It's crazy to think about, man, that the Mississippi River
<v Speaker 1>is like a hole. I was in. I was in
<v Speaker 1>eastern Missouri a few months ago, filming this sand plain
<v Speaker 1>that there's like, you know, every time you go to
<v Speaker 1>like a sand area that's surrounded by a lot of
<v Speaker 1>areas that are not sandy, you find completely different cast
<v Speaker 1>of plant species. And I was looking at it, and
<v Speaker 1>I was I looked at a topographic map, same thing,
<v Speaker 1>zoomed out on Google Maps, looked at a topographic map,
<v Speaker 1>and I was like, what, there's a fucking mesa here?
<v Speaker 2>How?
<v Speaker 1>And then I realized, Oh, that's not a mesa. That's
<v Speaker 1>like a old that's you know, been carved out. That's
<v Speaker 1>the just the regular bedrock that's been carved out by
<v Speaker 1>the Mississippi River six million years ago. And today the
<v Speaker 1>Mississippi River is like ten miles away to the east,
<v Speaker 1>but you could see the old channel where it came
<v Speaker 1>through this.
<v Speaker 2>Were you at Crowley Ridge?
<v Speaker 1>Uh No, I was at the Sand Plains conservation area.
<v Speaker 1>I forget where it was. And then I looked at
<v Speaker 1>the sand and the sand was it wasn't like beach sand.
<v Speaker 1>It was like river sand, like relatively large grain. There's
<v Speaker 1>pebbles in there that have been turned. It looks just
<v Speaker 1>like the sand you'd see on the banks of the
<v Speaker 1>present day Mississippi River, you know, if you were like
<v Speaker 1>fishing in you know, fucking southern Illinois or something right right,
<v Speaker 1>And it was I just thought about it, like God,
<v Speaker 1>the sand was put here probably a few million years ago,
<v Speaker 1>because today the river's ten miles to the east. But
<v Speaker 1>that's just you know, thinking about that itself. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>the more you learn about geology and botany and whatever,
<v Speaker 1>it's just it gives you more tools to read the
<v Speaker 1>landscape around you, and you're so much better equipped, you know,
<v Speaker 1>to take it all in and go to a new place,
<v Speaker 1>and you automatically have more data about it because you
<v Speaker 1>know what you.
<v Speaker 2>Look, you get a lot more out of it. And
<v Speaker 2>also you can like be attuned when things are really unusual,
<v Speaker 2>you know, or something like that.
<v Speaker 1>So you know you're.
<v Speaker 2>You're actually sending me back when you're talking about sand.
<v Speaker 2>I'm remembering a very formative experience I have when I
<v Speaker 2>was a kid. You know, I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida,
<v Speaker 2>right and there's not there's no mountains. I didn't see
<v Speaker 2>a mounta until I was eight when we moved to
<v Speaker 2>North care when we did a trip to North Carolina.
<v Speaker 2>But when I was like when I was around that age,
<v Speaker 2>elementary school, they took us to the beach to this
<v Speaker 2>place called the Marine Science Center, which was like this little,
<v Speaker 2>you know, government school thing where you they kids would
<v Speaker 2>go for the day and learn about ocean stuff, mostly
<v Speaker 2>for biology. But one of the things they did that
<v Speaker 2>was really that I'll never forget is they took a
<v Speaker 2>sample of the beach sand at Jacksonville Beach and put
<v Speaker 2>it under a microscope, and so we looked at what
<v Speaker 2>the sand looked like. And you know, when you're you know,
<v Speaker 2>when you're at the beach, you just see the sand
<v Speaker 2>this kind of like tan stuff, right, But when you
<v Speaker 2>put under a microscope, it was just like a kaleidoscope
<v Speaker 2>of all these different minerals that were you know, they
<v Speaker 2>explained there was garn it in there, you know, as
<v Speaker 2>a kid, you know, because kids like gems. I was
<v Speaker 2>very excited by that. There was garn it, There was quartz,
<v Speaker 2>there was magnetite, There was probably horn blend, and all
<v Speaker 2>kinds of things. You know that now that I know
<v Speaker 2>geology a lot better, I understand what I was looking at,
<v Speaker 2>which is these are all sands that are eroded from
<v Speaker 2>the Appalachian Mountains.
<v Speaker 1>That's crazy, Like where did that come from? The journey
<v Speaker 1>of that sand grain?
<v Speaker 2>Well, the journey is amazing.
<v Speaker 1>Right.
<v Speaker 2>First you had to have a mountain building episode, right,
<v Speaker 2>which we talked about earlier, the Appalachian erogeny, And then
<v Speaker 2>you had to have all these plutons, these granites formed
<v Speaker 2>beneath an old arch volcanic chain had to be uplifted
<v Speaker 2>somehow so that all that stuff gets eroded. Then it
<v Speaker 2>gets transported by rivers down to the coast and it
<v Speaker 2>gets you know, beaten up and turned into these sand grains,
<v Speaker 2>and those sand grains, through long, short drifts, will get
<v Speaker 2>transported down the coast down to a place where there's
<v Speaker 2>no granite. There's no there's no garnets at the surf
<v Speaker 2>us at all. And now some kid in Florida goes
<v Speaker 2>and collects little garnient sand grains on the beach and
<v Speaker 2>looks at it in a microscope and it's just it's magical.
<v Speaker 2>It's a magical little moment that you know. Those are
<v Speaker 2>these little things like the grand stories of geology are
<v Speaker 2>just a lot of fun. I think, I think those
<v Speaker 2>are good ways to teach people about it.
<v Speaker 1>It's it's it's well, it's one, it's fascinating into just
<v Speaker 1>I think what it does for people philosophically, you know,
<v Speaker 1>when they can get that that bigger story, you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's it's it's oddly soothing in a way. So I
<v Speaker 1>always tell people like, you know, you need some some
<v Speaker 1>good coping mechanisms, learn the geologic timescale, you know. So anyway, well, Cody,
<v Speaker 1>thanks so much for doing this. Man, what tectonic city
<v Speaker 1>is your Instagram? And then is there do you have
<v Speaker 1>a website or anything or anything else you want to
<v Speaker 1>put out there.
<v Speaker 2>No, I just let's see. I do Tectonic City and Instagram.
<v Speaker 2>I have a YouTube show called What's My Rock, which
<v Speaker 2>is in its infancy. It's still growing. The main problem
<v Speaker 2>is that it's really hard for me to edit, so
<v Speaker 2>it takes forever and so only I think I have
<v Speaker 2>like nine episodes up. I've got like so the purpose
<v Speaker 2>of the show, by the way I think you'll appreciate this,
<v Speaker 2>is I interview people about the rocks they bring in
<v Speaker 2>to have identified. So it's basically like interviews, Like it's
<v Speaker 2>interactions with the public about what their rock is. And
<v Speaker 2>you know, it's an It's It's common for geology professors
<v Speaker 2>all over the world where someone will call them up
<v Speaker 2>and say, hey, you want to identify my rock? And
<v Speaker 2>I used to do it when I started, but I
<v Speaker 2>stopped doing it for a while because I realized that
<v Speaker 2>people all they want to know is if they're going
<v Speaker 2>to be rich or not. And I don't care if
<v Speaker 2>they're going to be you know what I mean, Like
<v Speaker 2>you don't have you don't have a meteorite, right.
<v Speaker 1>I'm there's not like a deeper curiosity and passion.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, if it were like a mom and a kid. Sure,
<v Speaker 2>I'd do it, you know what I mean. But most
<v Speaker 2>people just want their meteaorites certified so that they can
<v Speaker 2>go sell it on eBay or something. And that's fine,
<v Speaker 2>it's good for them, good luck, have fun. Great. But
<v Speaker 2>I but I'm not interested in doing it. But then
<v Speaker 2>it hit me one day, Wait a second, what I
<v Speaker 2>should do is I should start interviewing them on camera
<v Speaker 2>because the people that would come in and remember we're
<v Speaker 2>at San Bernardino is like the gateway to the Mahabi desert,
<v Speaker 2>so we get some characters come in, right. So, like
<v Speaker 2>I had a guy. One guy came in, he had
<v Speaker 2>a handguns and it's satchel because he had to you know,
<v Speaker 2>he was there to make sure that the government agent
<v Speaker 2>me wasn't going to steal his rock and make money
<v Speaker 2>off of one. One guy brought in like a six six,
<v Speaker 2>three hundred and fifty pounds guy to be as muscle
<v Speaker 2>to make sure I wasn't gonna, you know, steal his rock.
<v Speaker 2>And there, you know, just a lot of characters and
<v Speaker 2>really interesting people. And I was like, I like to
<v Speaker 2>I'd like to film this, and so I started filming
<v Speaker 2>these interactions and it's been really fun. I really have
<v Speaker 2>enjoyed it, and so that anyways, that's that's not as
<v Speaker 2>popular as Tectonic City, but I think that's that's going
<v Speaker 2>to grow. So it's it's called what's my Rocket's on
<v Speaker 2>my YouTube channel for Tectonic City. These are fine.
<v Speaker 1>Tecitanic City is fucking great. It's hilarious and it's just yeah, man,
<v Speaker 1>there's a lot of good info in there too. But really,
<v Speaker 1>I mean the fucking Halloween costumes of like parental Titan
<v Speaker 1>It's like, yeah, it's it's pretty on point for anyone,
<v Speaker 1>I guess, for anyone who's not a geologist and not
<v Speaker 1>going to school for this but would like to learn
<v Speaker 1>a little bit more, what would you.
<v Speaker 2>Suggest, Oh, I mean if they don't want to take
<v Speaker 2>a class, you know, actually a great series of books
<v Speaker 2>to read of the Roadside Geology books from Mountain Press.
<v Speaker 2>I'm sure you've seen those. It's a really fun those
<v Speaker 2>are well written, and they're good for an intro audience,
<v Speaker 2>you know, if they don't want to read, do people
<v Speaker 2>even read anymore?
<v Speaker 1>So, I know it doesn't seem like it too much.
<v Speaker 2>So, but you know, there's so many there's so many
<v Speaker 2>good YouTube channels, a lot of people are doing some
<v Speaker 2>really good stuff there that are that are where they
<v Speaker 2>want to educate, right, they're trying to educate the I mean,
<v Speaker 2>you know my stuff. I'll be on it's just between
<v Speaker 2>you and me. I'm just trying to get people to
<v Speaker 2>laugh and have a good time. So if I educate them,
<v Speaker 2>that's fine, But I really mostly it's a it's a
<v Speaker 2>performative comedy show. Although it's all although it's accurate, you know,
<v Speaker 2>I'm not going to say it's not accurate scientifically, but
<v Speaker 2>but if it's not funny, I'm just not as interested
<v Speaker 2>and I want to try to make jokes. But there
<v Speaker 2>are a lot of people that their main purpose is
<v Speaker 2>to educate, and so there's so many you know, tiktoks
<v Speaker 2>and YouTube stuff about that that would be good. But
<v Speaker 2>you know, yeah, I guess if they're interested.
<v Speaker 1>I always tell people just like learn the three main
<v Speaker 1>rock types, learn you know about igneous rocks, and like
<v Speaker 1>the two sub types, and learn plate like read about
<v Speaker 1>plate tectonics, and with fucking AI like even if someone
<v Speaker 1>doesn't want to read, you can literally ask the Internet
<v Speaker 1>questions and it will answer them. Like you don't have
<v Speaker 1>to search for something and then parse through papers anymore,
<v Speaker 1>or you know, find the little you know gem, you know,
<v Speaker 1>separate the chaff from the the certain bit of information
<v Speaker 1>that you're looking for.
<v Speaker 2>So, I mean, the one, the one thing that really
<v Speaker 2>helps to go to school for is the actual identifying
<v Speaker 2>of rocks, right, So that's something that's really hard to
<v Speaker 2>do from books. That just takes experience and it really
<v Speaker 2>helps someone there to help you know what to look for.
<v Speaker 2>And that's one thing that that I think, you know,
<v Speaker 2>people do take a class that that you know, you
<v Speaker 2>could join a rock club. There's a lot of rock
<v Speaker 2>counting clubs everywhere, and all those guys are very knowledgeable.
<v Speaker 2>That's right, that's right, that's right. Make a friend and
<v Speaker 2>but they know a lot of those guys know their stuff,
<v Speaker 2>so they're they're you know, they're solid. Some of them don't,
<v Speaker 2>but that's okay.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. I love the other memeing you got the learning
<v Speaker 1>mineral identification techniques with with Elmo, just you know, doing
<v Speaker 1>lines off of Google images, just fucking like it's like,
<v Speaker 1>what people, how do you tell you look at the
<v Speaker 1>color like that? When I was first getting into jolity
<v Speaker 1>was like, oh, just look at the color just like well,
<v Speaker 1>it's there's a lot more than just color of a rock.
<v Speaker 1>You know.
<v Speaker 2>I'm editing what's my rock video right now? Where on
<v Speaker 2>screen I assume a mineral was something because it was pink,
<v Speaker 2>and it turns out it wasn't after further analysis, I
<v Speaker 2>made that same air myself, so it's a common error.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, well man, thanks so much for being down to
<v Speaker 1>do this. I appreciate it, and I hope everybody goes
<v Speaker 1>and checks out your page because it's a fucking hilarious
<v Speaker 1>Tectonic city on Instagram, so.
<v Speaker 2>Doc And also if they want some geology music, I
<v Speaker 2>got an album on called Campfire Songs for Geologists on
<v Speaker 2>streaming everywhere.
<v Speaker 1>I'll check that out right on. Okay, all right, thank
<v Speaker 1>you so much. Everybody else, have aggrace to day. Go
<v Speaker 1>fuck your somebody.