21 - Explosions of the Earth, Breakthroughs of the Mind: Volcanoes and Rescue Innovation with Dr. Rob Yonover - Revelizations

Episode Transcript
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(01:23):
Hi everyone and welcome to Revelizations.
I'm your host, Brian James.
On today's episode, we are joined by inventor and volcanologist, Dr. Rob Yonover.

(01:48):
What's a volcanologist?
What did he invent?
Let's find out.
Dr. Yonover received his Ph.D. in Geochemistry Volcanology from University of Hawaii School
of Ocean and Earth Science Technology with laboratory research at NASA Johnson Space
Center and MIT.
He is also the inventor of the See/Rescue, a high visibility locating device that is

(02:11):
now used by all branches of the U.S. military.
Today Dr. Yonover joins me and we discuss the See/Rescue, the events that inspired its
inception, along with how do volcanoes form, what studying volcanoes can teach us, the
different types of eruptions, what happens when a super volcano erupts, how volcanoes

(02:33):
create islands, the nature of the Earth's core, and more.
Thanks for listening everyone.
Hi Rob.
It's nice to meet you.
I'm so happy that you're here and that we just get to have a fun conversation.
Same here, Brian.
Thanks for having me.
My pleasure.
Thank you.
Of course.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and you have a lot of interest and you have a lot

(02:55):
of expertise that I'm just really looking forward to diving into.
Sure.
I'm Dr. Rob Yonover.
I'm a scientist and inventor from Honolulu, Hawaii.
I'm a surfer by nature and I've studied volcanoes and while I was working on submarine volcanoes
and volcanoes in general, I invented survival gear, the streamer, which is behind you, and

(03:17):
it's led to military approvals and adoption and save lives and I just am a lifelong learner
and inventor really and I've learned to solve problems and go from there and try to eke
out a living doing it.
There's a lot of different ways to go to, but I feel like let's talk about the product
that you invented the most because that can have some real life impact on people.

(03:39):
Sure.
Well, when you're lost at sea or on land, your head's a little speck.
It's really small.
And typically they have smoke signals, flares, sea dye marker.
It all goes away in the water and on land you can just kind of raise your hand or even
a cell phone.
If the searchers know where you are, that doesn't matter as much as seeing you.

(04:02):
They still need a visual target.
So I invented a long orange streamer that gives you a 25 or 40 foot long orange tail
and I patented struts in it.
You can see the white bar in this one behind me.
So it's a spreader bar.
So it's like a centipede.
It won't twist up or curl up in the rough water or the winds and the military loved

(04:23):
it because not only was it continuous, no other signals continuous, smoke, flare, dye,
all goes away, but it's redeployable and it's discretionary.
So you can put it out when you want to.
The enemy's around, you can pull it back in and then redeploy it.
None of those signaling devices can do that.
You know, it's been a long haul.
I've been doing this for 30 years and people don't like disruptors in any field.

(04:49):
And this was a very much a disruptive invention because the smoke guys and flare guys and
sea dye marker, they want to sell their products.
And here comes a long guy from Hawaii with a piece of orange plastic saying this is better.
And it's still a big fight.
I mean, it's a, people don't like a simple solution, but my whole brain space is simpler

(05:09):
is better.
I don't really care function over form.
You know, I don't care what it looks like, does it work and does it work simply?
And in fact, as an inventor, I invented the home run.
You never, you're not to touch it again.
So it never runs out as a business person.
That's a horrible invention because you can't keep getting money from people.
So like the original one I made, like 30, 40 years ago, was still on my little boat.

(05:34):
And, you know, I laugh when I see it because I'm like, OK, well, it's still working if
I need it, but God, I would have made a lot more money if they had, if they expired every
two years.
Yeah.
You just need to come up with a subscription model that somehow like disintegrates if they
don't pay you every month.
Right.
Exactly.
Well, the fighter pilot version, you can see this light back here.
It has lights and auto deploy.

(05:56):
So when it hits the water, it goes out automatically.
We have water soluble ties to it like rice paper candy, the plastic material used for
that or dishwasher pouches.
So the pouch is tied up.
And when the fighter pilot hits the water, they might be injured or incapacitated.
Pouch dissolves, the ties dissolve, the pouch opens and the streamer goes out automatically.

(06:20):
And the lights are triggered by photo sensors.
So it doesn't flash till nighttime.
So that one's a little different because you have to keep up the batteries and electronics.
But even that one, I've kind of phased out because I still go back to the simpler tag
line, which was no batteries, chemicals or electronics.
Trying to fail.
I like that as a boater and a surfer and a waterman and a hiker and a volcano guy, things

(06:43):
fail in the field all the time.
So the ability to have a device that you know won't fail is very comforting when you're
going deep into wilderness.
So that's basically, I still stand by it.
Yeah, I would have made a lot more money if it had to be renewed every couple of years,
but that's okay.
I'd rather solve the problem elegantly.

(07:04):
I think that's the better way to be, to be looking for the actual solution for people's
safety rather than to, how can I market this that I'm going to get just residuals essentially.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So that worked for me.
Yeah.
I think that's a much more noble pursuit.
I can see definitely why the military would be very interested in this.

(07:27):
Like you said, it's deployable, redeployable.
So yeah, if you're in a situation where you don't want to be visible, where that's against
your best nature, then yeah, that makes a ton of sense.
And continuous.
A flare or smoke lasts seconds or minutes.
Even CDI marker can only last like a half hour.
If it's really rough, the water dissipates it.

(07:48):
This thing, if you have it on a raft or you're floating, you can go to sleep, but it's still
working for you.
You know, it's just trailing behind you.
What's really funny is, you know, and I've worked, I've built this company, basically,
my brother was in advertising and he kept telling me they're editors sitting, wondering
what to write about.
So I have been this relentless, but I bug people till they write about it.

(08:11):
So I've, you know, men's journal, CNN, Discovery Channel, Shark Tank, I mean, the list goes
on and on and I keep plugging the publicity and in fact right now as we speak, I'm about
to hit 50 million views on YouTube.
The thing went viral.
Someone took my Shark Tank clip and made a one minute short out of it and YouTube, it's

(08:32):
been on there for like a couple of weeks and it's just going ballistic, which is really
cool.
You know?
Yeah.
So it's funny because a lot of people give me for not being social media savvy, you know,
I'm basic.
I'm crawling or stumbling like a toddler, but I'm in there.
But how many people, but I am viral.
I've been, they did the same thing on TikTok.

(08:52):
I got 16 million views on TikTok.
I'm not even on TikTok, got almost 50 million on YouTube and it's kind of funny.
But you know, PR is PR.
Yeah.
It's great.
You said you mentioned how it was subterranean volcanoes.
That was your focus?
Yeah.

(09:12):
Yeah.
Exactly.
I actually Galapagos submarine, actually.
A submarine.
Okay.
Did you ever see the movie Titanic, that old red and white submarine?
I went down in that submarine two miles deep off Galapagos to the ocean floor spreading
center of the volcano that's splitting apart the ocean crust.
And we took samples with the robotic arms, got them to the surface and then I analyzed

(09:36):
them using ion probe at MIT and another probing mass spectrometer at NASA Johnson Space Center
and here in Hawaii using the micro probe it's called, anyway, analyzing the chemical composition
of the lavas inside a lava when a mineral grows from the magma chamber, it forms a bubble.

(09:56):
If you look under a microscope, it forms a bubble just like a tray of ice cubes.
When you make ice cubes, sometimes there's a bubble inside, same thing happens.
This bubble is an exact sample of the magma chamber magma before it gets polluted by the
air and water and all the other chemicals.

(10:16):
So it's a visual way to look down into the magma chamber and using this ion probe or
laser beam, we blow up these little tiny bubbles that are smaller.
I once took a dime and put it under our laser and made a pimple on the nose of Roosevelt
on a dime.
So next time you have a dime, a 10 cent piece in your hand, look at his nose, that's how

(10:39):
small the laser makes a hole and it releases the gas or it analyzes it depending if it's
gas or glass phase.
And then that was my PhD working on that, it was crazy.
And I invented this streamer while I was doing this.
And it occurred to me that this is really, really cool and I'm really lucky, only a thousand

(11:00):
people have been down two miles deep in the ocean and I was really fortunate.
But I realized right away that academia wasn't fulfilling enough for me in terms of what
problem are you solving?
For me, it was more academic, which is cool.
I could have been an expert on vulcanological composition of Galapagos Rift lavas.

(11:21):
But I'd think, why don't I invent something that has a real impact?
And in my case, the streamers saved lives already.
So a guy came up to me and thanked me for saving his life.
I'm like, okay, that's meaningful.
And so that's where it all started.
And that was the split I took.
And you know, I still love volcanoes and I go all over the world when I can.

(11:41):
I just was on an active volcano in Iceland and southern Italy in the last couple of years.
And it's awesome.
And in Big Island, Hawaii, we got a big eruption going on now.
And I was over there a couple of weeks ago, thousand foot fountains.
So I'm still in, I still have a foot in the geological, vulcological world, but my day
job is the streamer.

(12:01):
So I definitely want to jump into volcanoes, but what I wanted to circle back to was what
caused you to invent the See/Rescue?
Sure.
Well, one of the other grad students at the time was a pilot and we rented a Cessna single
engine plane from a rental place in Honolulu airport.

(12:22):
And I don't know if you've ever flown in a single engine propeller plane and it was a
rental so it wasn't maybe cared for as good as it.
So it was kind of missing.
It was like being in the air with a VW from the 70s, you know.
And I looked down and I saw, I did not feel safe at all except for the fact that you're
kind of gliding in those.
It's not like a jet, so you're kind of gliding and Hawaii is very windy.

(12:45):
So the wind's bobbling us all around.
I'm like, wow, this is wild.
And then I looked down, have you been to Hawaii?
It's just massive dark blue water like this everywhere.
So when I got up there, I'm like, and my late wife was with me and he had his girlfriend,
I'm like, these guys are not water people.
If we crash, I can swim to shore and live because, you know, then they crash slow, you

(13:07):
know.
He could probably ditch in the water and live.
You got a better shot of surviving a ditching in a single engine propeller than you do have
a jet.
There's very few jet landings on water.
So when I looked at the water, I'm like, oh, look at all this water.
They're never going to see us.
The plane's metal.
It's going to sink.
I started thinking about, well, what do they have for us?

(13:29):
Smoke, flares, die.
This would be four cell phones.
But even if we radio that we're lost at this one spot.
So then I, and then a couple of weeks later, I flew to Florida, which is where I grew up.
And you heard the artist, Christo anyway, Christo was an artist in Miami.
He's an artist, French artist, and he does big global art.

(13:51):
And he wrapped these islands of Miami in pink plastic all over the place.
So when I flew over that, this is two weeks later, I'm like, oh my God, that's it.
If I just had a piece of pink plastic behind me, a pink, a pink tail, and I worked on it
for a while and I talked to my neighbor, who was a Navy guy.

(14:11):
First thing he said was lose the pink, you know, Navy doesn't like the color pink, which
was funny.
So I went to international orange, then I took it.
First it was just bubble wrap.
I thought bubble wrap will work.
But then when I tested it, it just got twisted and curled up.
And it wasn't until I figured out these struts, these white spreader bars, that I basically

(14:31):
figured out how to prevent it from twisting and curling up.
It's like a helix, like a DNA, it'll spin itself out.
And that was also the strength of the patents because that was a whole unique way of solving
this problem.
And have you heard of biomimicry?
The field of biomimicry where you mimic bio, you mimic nature.

(14:52):
So if you look, if you believe nature's billions of years old, evolution, so nature's evolved
to survive.
A centipede has segmentation so it doesn't twist up.
Your vertebrae is segmented.
A palm tree is segmented.
A lot of strong things are segmented for strength.
So this streamer has these white bars every three feet, so it's segmented.

(15:15):
And that was the beginning of the journey to kind of disrupt that signaling world.
And it was a two-step thing, I was thinking of it from that little plane and then getting
inspired from a bigger plane flying over a piece of pink plastic artwork that wrapped
in Miami, these little offshore islands, actually inshore islands.

(15:36):
But it was, it seems like I get a lot of ideas from a plane window, looking out a window
about the top.
What other ideas have you gotten while looking out a plane window?
Oh, millions of them.
Lately, I can't handle getting claustrophobic or getting locked into the window, so I'm
more on the aisle.

(15:56):
But I think of everything.
I mean, everyday life.
I've got a bunch of other inventions, and a lot of them come from looking out windows.
I basically got stuck, not stuck, but I landed in the survival world.
So I have a pocket flotation device.
I have an inflatable paddle board, rescue board.
I have a whole story about that.

(16:16):
That became a big legal battle because the inflatable paddle boards took off after, and
that whole industry wanted to kill me because I had the patent for that, and they didn't
want to pay me royalties.
And a video search and rescue device that spots orange lines automatically based on
shape and color.
And then my, in my opinion, my home run idea, which is still, I'm still working on it.

(16:39):
It's been 20 years and I got it funded by the military.
I just can't get it to produce enough, which is a pocket desalinator.
I figured out a way to passively convert salt water to fresh water, simple.
And I know how to build it.
I just can't.
I don't have the expertise.
I can build it, but it's in its primitive state.

(17:00):
It only makes a half a cup of water a day.
I need it to make a liter a day.
And then I'll be, I'll probably win a Nobel prize because all the future wars are going
to be fought on water, not over oil.
They're going to be fought over fresh water because we're all going to die.
We can die without water.
So anyway, I have a, it works using Gore-Tex, you know, Gore-Tex, it's a good raincoat

(17:22):
material because it's expanded Teflon.
So if you can imagine, it's like a web like this and the holes are so small that
raindrops don't go through it, but air does.
That's why it breathes.
It's a good raincoat.
So I took that in reverse.
I made a double bag.
The inner bag is black.
They're black and they have an inner bag, which has a window of this Gore-Tex.

(17:47):
It's not Gore-Tex.
I use another manufacturer, but you put salt water in it, put it in the sun.
The salt water evaporates and it goes through those holes.
But guess what?
The salt crystals are too fat.
They don't go through.
So it separates out the salt from the salt water, then it recondenses and
you can sip the water all day.
And I got it pretty far.

(18:07):
The military bought some and they did a testing in the Philippines with it during
an exercise, but it was cloudy, unfortunately, and it didn't produce
as much water as they like.
And I kind of put it on pause and I've been just so busy with the streamer.
I haven't really gotten back to it, but now I found the guy company that can
make the plastic customized to what I need to optimize that conversion of

(18:32):
salt water to steam so it can separate the salt from the water.
So I'm hoping maybe, maybe the next time you see me, I'll have that one.
That'll be the follow-up.
Yeah, that's really fascinating.
Yeah, I just, I hate hearing about that whole, the water, the next wars are
going to be fought over water and like, that's always scary to hear.

(18:53):
Well, the truth is if we have enough oil, it's not a problem.
So it's like a catch-22.
We can kill ourselves with oil.
Just like in the Middle East, they have plenty of fresh water because they
desalinate using oil to run turbines to shove the salt water through filters.
And that takes a lot of energy to do that, to get pure water on the other side.

(19:14):
So as long as we have energy, we can get fresh water.
That's what I've heard.
I've heard it's like the desalination processes.
It's not a problem that really needs to be looked into yet.
So people haven't really looked into yet and solved like a really big scale.
So it's like what we have right now is fine, but if we get like a bad
solar flare or something like that, and that grid goes down, then it's going to

(19:37):
be a, it's not going to be a fun world to live in.
Here in Hawaii, sometimes we get power outages and sometimes water outages,
but I've realized that the water outage is much worse than the power outage
because without even without electricity, you can do other things, but without
water, you start really noticing it.
You know, you don't really, you take it for granted so much.

(20:01):
Yeah.
You take a civilization for granted.
I think COVID was a really big illuminator of that, of just how
thin the veil is of civility.
Now, when everything is going the way it's supposed to go, everyone's nice.
Everyone's polite.
As soon as there's a pandemic, well, there goes the toilet paper.
Exactly.
And then everyone, everyone's up in arms.

(20:22):
I think we're still recovering from that really.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We really are.
It'll be very fascinating to see all the rippers that this has from COVID, but
I wanted to speak in about end of the world and your expertise in volcanoes.
That is a real way because it happened before with the dinosaurs.

(20:44):
Well, I guess it's a little bit different because a meteor.
That was a, that was a meteor.
Yeah, right.
But it could have been a, it could have been eruption.
I mean, the big, the Vesuvius, I mean, Krakatoa in Indonesia erupted and it
changed the weather for like 30 years on earth.
So it's, you know, if you get enough ash in the atmosphere, you can have global
cooling, which is interesting because perhaps that could save us a little

(21:07):
from global warming.
I mean, I'm not saying I'm not hoping for a catastrophic volcanic eruption, but
it's funny how nature has its ways usually to equal itself out.
But again, as a geologist, you know that the timescale of billions of years, if
you look at the timescale of earth on a yardstick, humans have only been around

(21:30):
the last like millimeter of that yardstick.
So we're so insignificant.
And even to say something takes 20 years to 30 years or 50 years to straighten
out, that's nothing geologically or earth time wise.
It's very hard to think about these things when you put a timescale to it.
Yeah.
It was more the, the meteor mechanism of causing like what you said, the ash.

(21:52):
So we have super volcanoes that have the potential to cause mass climate change
essentially and happen like very fast.
And the U S is sitting on at least one with Yellowstone.
And I believe that we're, we're within the window of eruption as far as like
the, the timescale happens to every like X amount of years and like we're within

(22:16):
the X amount of years right now.
Definitely.
It can all happen for sure.
And that's why, you know, it's almost like the luck of the jaw, hope for the best.
But you know, we try to prevent accidents from happening, but for instance, Los
Alamos is in the, in the middle of that bias caldera in Yellowstone area.
Well, or the one in New Mexico is a super volcano too, where they built, they

(22:38):
basically built the atomic bomb inside an explosive volcanic crater and didn't know.
If you go to Los Alamos, you see a mountain range and you go, that's a nice one.
You keep looking and it goes all the way around you till you realize you're in a
crater, absolutely the worst place to build an atomic bomb, I think, but, but they
didn't know, they didn't talk to the geologist.

(23:00):
Somehow we've, uh, we've, we've eeked out of extinction a few times, but I was
kind of, I was wondering if you could like dive into kind of what that would look
like a little bit, if Yellowstone, when Yellowstone erupts, like what does that
do to the climate, are there going to be like warning signs or they're going to be
tremors or is it just going to be like just suddenly it's erupting?

(23:22):
Yeah.
I mean, that kind of volcano typically, from what I've learned in like Taupo
and New Zealand, they have explosive eruptions there too.
And the difference between a regular mellow eruption, like Hawaii,
fountaining, orange lava flowing, building an island is the bigger options
go from a crater to nothing.

(23:42):
A lake is left.
So it's, that's why it's hard to study them.
I think, and that's why they miss Los Alamos that they didn't even, I mean,
if the big crater was there, they might've gotten a better picture of why you
shouldn't build an atomic bomb right there.
But because they leave nothing, it's really tough.
And the one in New Zealand, Lake Taupo, it left a lake after.

(24:04):
So it went from a cone to a lake, but the one indicator was that there's
hot springs near there and people got scalded a couple of days before.
So the superheated water started coming up and getting you, but that's not
really going to do much if you only have a day or two.
I mean, if it's really a massive eruption of Yellowstone, if you're even close,

(24:27):
you're probably in trouble.
And then the ash can, can circle the globe and change.
It blocks the sun from coming in.
And then the sun that does come in kind of gets re-reflected back to earth.
So, and I'm not really a climatologist, but I know that's not really
in the handbook for earth.
That's not really what's supposed to happen.

(24:47):
But I think, I think they called it, it's like a nuclear winter.
You've heard that.
So it's similar to that.
So if you, if you put radiation in the whole earth or same as ash, the
global temperatures come down.
I think that's what happened after Krakatoa in Indonesia in, I think
it was a 1700 or 1800, it was, it was cold for 20 years or something.

(25:08):
So it was like, again, it's ironic because we need a, we need a cold spell
in this world that's heating up.
So not to root for it, but I don't know how it would look and I don't
think there'd be warnings.
Like in Hawaii, we have tilt meters and glazers scanning for inflation.
So if the thing's inflating a couple of meters, a couple of millimeters, and
it's, it's showing the magma is bulging up and there's going to be an eruption

(25:32):
and they have seismometers.
So you can see if it's shaking, you know, but super volcanoes are different
because they may or may not give you warning.
And even like Mount St.
Helens, which is somewhere in between that, that erupted in the eighties.
And that was a big thing.
And a lot of people got killed because they had warnings and they told people,

(25:52):
but people still didn't heed those warnings.
But that, that's not, I mean, that's an explosive eruption, but it's
not the real explosive ones, which it's based on contents.
So more silica in the, in the lava, the stickier it is.
So instead of like Hawaii has low silica, so it just erupts.
It flows like syrup is a good analogy.

(26:15):
Whereas super volcanoes are more like toothpaste.
You squeeze it, nothing's coming out.
Then all of a sudden, boom.
So it's a different consistency of the lava.
So it gets plugged up more.
So when it does erupt, it blows up.
It doesn't ooze out.
So Hawaii volcanoes are the safest because you can walk right up to them, really.

(26:36):
But an eruption at Mount St.
Helens or Yellowstone is not going to be safe.
You'd really don't want to be close to it.
And especially nowadays with Emma, with their cameras, I'm going to be looking
there, trying to get a photo.
So that might not be good either.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
So if a volcano like the one in Hawaii is actively erupting because of the silica

(26:59):
content that you said, there's, there's little to no risk of it.
Like having a mega explosion.
Right.
You could walk away from Hawaiian volcanoes.
I mean, when it's fountaining, it's a thousand foot fountain.
Yeah.
If you're near that, you're going to get burned, but you can see it.
You can hear it.
The ground's rumbling.

(27:19):
The air is making noise.
You see this thousand foot fountain in the area.
Like, okay, I shouldn't, if you're smart, I shouldn't get too close to that.
You know, I want to get close.
And that's what I did for a while.
And I love that, but close it's measured risk.
We knew how close to get, but lay people shouldn't get too close.
But the other kinds of eruptions, in fact, they have glowing ash clouds,

(27:42):
like, like Mount St.
Helens and a friend of mine, Mount Etna, which I was just up in
Italy a couple of weeks ago, it just erupted yesterday.
And if you watch the video, it looks so slow.
So a friend of mine said, Oh, it's so slow looking the cloud, but it's really fast.
It looks like it's slow motion.
The cloud just keeps growing.
But the base of it, of that cloud is firing out very quickly.

(28:05):
And like Vesuvius in Italy, that other volcano, people got fried in place.
So if that ash, they call it a new AR dot, which is like a glowing ash cloud.
If that hits you, you're dead immediately.
So if you go to Vesuvius in Italy, there are people that are frozen.
They were just like, you know, doing their cooking and all of a sudden
they're frozen in the form of cooking their meal.

(28:28):
So it's like it's superheated ash that just overruns you.
And in fact, those people, there was a movie recently about that couple that
called themselves volcanologists.
And it was a, it was called something like, I forgot what it's called,
but there was a French couple and us real volcanologists and real geologists
were offended by them for years because they ran around chasing volcanoes.

(28:51):
And yet they had no expertise at all.
He didn't even go to, she had a chemistry degree and he basically
flunked out of geology or something.
So they're pretending like they're PhD volcanologists doing
studies and taking samples.
And a friend of mine got called.
They went to Japan to this one eruption and they thought they could

(29:12):
witness this ash flow by being on the side of the ridge and it
would flow right below them.
So you can like, it's a valley and they're up on the ridge and the
volcano is going to erupt and the ash is going to come down the valley,
but they'll be higher.
And guess what?
They weren't high enough.
That ash went all the way over both sides and they got killed immediately.

(29:33):
So, I mean, I hate to ruin the end of the meeting, but the end of the movie.
But if you see that movie, I forgot what they're, what it's called.
The craft, like craft food, that's Maurice craft.
That's the guy's name, but it's called something about volcanoes.
And I, and again, I, I just, I, we didn't have much sympathy for them
because I knew they wanted to die that way that they were chasing

(29:54):
volcanoes unprofessionally and irresponsibly all over the world till
they finally met their maker.
And they didn't necessarily want to die, but they were attempting fate more.
So do you think they really have like a death wish?
Nah, yeah, I don't think they really want to die.
I think they would like to be close to death for the publicity, but I don't
think, I don't think they want to die fully because now they can't talk

(30:17):
anymore and they can't make videos.
I mean, people get into weird things.
So I didn't know.
I was just curious.
Yeah, I don't know either.
I didn't know them, but again, my good friend of mine who worked in Japan on
volcanoes was asked to go with them on that trip and he almost went, he would
have been dead too.
So, or maybe he would have been wise enough to say, we shouldn't be sitting

(30:37):
here because you know, you never know the ma the, the scale of an eruption can
get a little greater.
And then all of a sudden, what you think is a safe position is not safe because
nature has a way of, you know, not behaving exactly how it's modeled to behave.
Yeah, that's, that's unfortunate.

(30:58):
But I mean, sometimes, I mean, to, to make a call back to, to Darwin, like
there's Darwin awards that just get handed out and unfortunately for them,
but fortunately for other people, you, you learn an example of like, Hey, this
is, this is nature.
It's unpredictable, predictable to a certain extent, but it's still
unpredictable and it doesn't care that you're, you have a camera in your hand.

(31:20):
You will be a casualty.
Exactly.
And I, I just, I was offended by the whole thing because I, I, I saw it play
out in real time and I just remember them getting publicity before this, before
they died, I'm like, these guys are idiots.
You know, they shouldn't be doing this in the first place, you know, volcano
hunters, it's like tornado hunters.
You know, do you really have a lot of sympathy or run with the bulls?

(31:43):
Am I the only one that roots for the bulls when they run with the bulls in
Spain, you know, it's cruelty to animals.
I, I want those guys to get gored.
I don't, you know, it's cruel.
The whole thing is cruel.
Then they kill the bulls.
So, or, or chasing a tornado.
Yes.
You get great imagery for us to look at how close you can get to a tornado.
And I, and I, I love looking at that image, but I also know that they're

(32:06):
taking a risk and I appreciate that risk because they're giving us valuable
footage and maybe the crafts when they took footage, there's some great footage,
but, you know, you got to like sign a release, you know, they knew the risks.
Not well enough, apparently, but yeah, I hear what you're saying.
It's like, it's just a disservice.
It's like, it's probably after the, when twister came out, like the first one in

(32:30):
the nineties, there was probably a bunch of meteorologists that were up in arms.
We were like, Hey, like this is encouraging really unsafe behavior.
And so like you're saying the same thing.
Like this is encouraging really unsafe behavior.
You need to respect nature.
Exactly.
And I think the smartphones are part of the problem.
The selfies, everyone wants a hero picture of themselves online.

(32:50):
It happens in Hawaii all the time.
People will get closer and closer, just the ocean here.
They want to get a picture right where the waves are bringing behind them.
Guess what?
The wave doesn't always break right here.
Sometimes it's a little higher and it plucks you.
And all of a sudden you're in the ocean and you're in the big time ocean.
This isn't like a, you know, like a bathtub.
You'll get sucked by currents so far out.

(33:12):
If you don't know what you're doing, you're going to die.
People die here all the time.
And, you know, a lot of it's trying to get a good picture.
And that's why they need to see rescue increase their odds of survival.
Maybe it's good for business.
To an extent.
Is there some sort of, because to go back to what we were talking about and the

(33:36):
different types of eruptions and what is more of a violent eruption and there's
going to be the silica content of it.
Is there some, is there like a, is this like dreaming too big of like a sort of
silica solvent that will, like, if, if we do suspect like, Hey, there's been some
weird behavior around Yellowstone, Los Alamos, like we need to, if we can't

(34:03):
intervene before something happens, because we know, like you said, nuclear
winter is going to be a continent killer.
That's interesting.
It's an interesting idea.
And they've tried, they've tried stuff.
They've tried, they've tried things like bombing volcanoes to get a preemptive
eruption so they can control it.
They've built walls to prevent certain flows, but that's more in Hawaii or

(34:24):
Iceland where, where it's a flow or Italy where you can get a flow and redirect it.
The explosive ones.
I don't know how you would kind of change the composition of the lava when the
lava is miles below the surface.
So you'd have to drill wells and inject something in there and you could never
drill something into 2000 degree heat.

(34:47):
You know, the, the drill bit would melt.
So it's a real, it's interesting.
I never thought of it that way, but I guess the preemptive strike is
probably the way to do it, but that, that means dropping a small nuclear weapon,
nuclear bomb on a volcano to get, to disrupt the plumbing.

(35:09):
It's still magma and magma chamber and mantle.
The plumbing system is established.
So what you're trying to do is disrupt it and maybe make it erupt in a small
way, a certain direction, but that is really high risk because again, you
don't know how it responds.
What if you hit it and it taps it even deeper and it erupts even greater than

(35:31):
it would have if you just left it alone?
But, but the flip side volcano volcanoes aren't all bad and coming back, you
know, Hawaii, you know why Hawaii is so beautiful, Sicily and Italy and Iceland.
It's so incredible because the nutrients that it's delivering from the mantle are
so rich in nutrients for soil to grow things and even the oceans, the oceans

(35:57):
around here are feeding off the phytoplankton and all it creates a whole
food source and the food it's, it's incredible.
The food here.
And I I've noticed that I grew up in Florida.
The seafood here tastes a hundred times better than Florida.
The water's cooler.
That's one thing, but I'm starting to think the nutrient rich water, because

(36:18):
in Italy, same thing, the nutrient rich water, there's like an explosion of life.
And I, you know, I'd spent some time in Florence years ago in college, but this
time going to Sicily where you're near the ocean and in the water, was it
swimming in the water, there's so much explosive explosion of life, the
diversity of life and the farms and the vineyards, you know, the Italian wines

(36:43):
and all the things that they grow there.
It just tastes incredible.
And the reason is the volcano is fertilizing it.
So volcanoes are good and bad, and they're also cooling the earth.
So it's part of a process that, you know, you kind of don't
want to mess with mother nature.
There's plans there.
And I think if you live close to a volcano and respect distance, you're probably

(37:08):
okay and you can get the good parts out of it without getting the bad parts out.
Is it true that there's like another Hawaiian Island that's being created right now?
Yes, absolutely.
Loihi.
Well, they have a different name for it, but they're offshore.
Hawaii is a hot spot.
So there's like a whole weak spot in the mantle and it's like a conveyor belt.

(37:31):
It pumps out an island and you understand about plate tectonics.
The plates are moving back and forth.
So it pumps out a volcano and then it slides over and then another
island and then another island.
And if you look at a map, a submarine map, these islands go all the way from
Hawaii and then it goes up to the Northwest Pacific and then it goes straight

(37:53):
north, it changes direction, these islands and goes into Alaska.
So I used to, I do a lot of outreach with kids.
If you could empty the Pacific ocean and you were a giant, I could jump like
stepping stones all the way for thousands of islands, all the way to Alaska.
And those all came out of the hot spot that is under the big island right now.

(38:15):
As it's sliding off the big Island, there's a new one forming underwater.
And the only reason they discovered it that early was a hundred years ago,
fishermen were fishing in sulfur bubbles were coming out of the water so they
could smell the volcano, you know, it was giving off sulfur gas.
So the island and the other nice thing about that, the amazing thing about these

(38:37):
thousand Island volcanoes all the way to Alaska, when they get to Alaska, the
plate slides under the Alaska plate.
Those volcanoes get re-melted and then get erupted as explosive volcanoes in
Alaska and that's what happened in Sicily too, the African plate hit the European
plate and went under and that's where these volcanoes that I just saw were

(39:01):
erupting from.
So it's really, it's amazing.
The whole vulcanological world, if you're into it, it's really incredible.
I mean, just where I'm standing right now, I'm on Oahu, which is, you know,
there's big Island and in Maui, Molokai, then Oahu.
So I'm three islands away, four islands away from the hot spot.

(39:21):
But to think that there's a thousand more islands and what happens is they get
too heavy.
So they're underwater, but at one time, most of them were above water and then
they sink down.
So there's still, if you look at a map of the Pacific ocean, a geomorphic map with
structure, you can see all these islands, these little volcanoes and not even

(39:43):
little, but it's just amazing.
That gives you a time perspective of the earth because you see an eruption and
each eruption adds like a layer of, to the land, right?
The islands are built by thousands of eruptions on top of each other.
And think about that relative to a thousand islands.
So that gives you a timeframe and it's got to move.

(40:05):
It's only moving.
The plate's only moving like an inch a year, so it's got to move all the way to
Alaska by an inch a year.
And that's what happened because those volcanoes that are now being subducted
under Alaska, they formed right here where the big Island is that that hot spot
off the big Island is a mega one and it's established.
And the cool thing about Iceland, if you ever get a chance to go there, that's

(40:29):
the combination place that has hot spots like Hawaii, but it also has spreading
centers like Galapagos.
So it's new ocean crust forming on a plate division, a plate, two plates are
erupting like this, but it's also as hotspots.
So that's the mix of two of the greatest eruption types of all.
So you said that new Island is coming up, correct?

(40:52):
Yes, but not in our lifetime.
I think it's still a thousand feet from the surface.
So yeah, I just need some flotation devices to encourage it to come up.
No, I mean, if you I wouldn't advise going there and waiting to see it, you're
not going to see anything.
But if you could have a time lapse into the future, ten thousand years.

(41:12):
That's so neat. So is it possible?
Like, because you said these other islands are sinking.
Is it possible that like the Hawaiian islands will eventually sink?
They'll get too heavy. Absolutely.
They're already sinking.
I mean, the interesting koi, you know, if you look and the style
of the eruption, if you go to the big island, it's all black lava.

(41:33):
It's really rough.
It's brand new and it's a big shield like this.
It's a big broad shield.
But then the rain comes and starts raining and the trade winds
and there's little valleys.
And then if you go to Kauai, which is older than Oahu, even it's sinking
and it's eroding.
So it's a beautiful green island with all these valleys and rainbows

(41:57):
and, you know, water waterfalls.
And it's sinking again.
It's probably I don't know what the data is, but it's not sinking fast.
But geologically, it's fast.
Maybe an inch, not an inch a year.
That's too fast.
But the other thing is what happens is and you can see this in like Necker,

(42:18):
some of these other islands further up Johnson, the toll bikini
where they did tests is the volcano forms and because everything is rich
in nutrients, coral reef forms around it.
It's called an atoll and eventually the volcano gets so heavy it sinks.
But the coral reef that was surrounding it stays up because it's alive.

(42:40):
It's living off the sun and the ocean.
So you see a lot of volcanoes.
The only thing left is the ring of coral reef around it.
It's kind of crazy.
Yeah. Yeah.
I had no idea that the eventually the Hawaiian islands would sink.
I also didn't know that there is all these, like, however many islands
from Hawaii to Alaska, all shooting out and proliferating from the same volcano.

(43:05):
Like, that's fascinating.
Yeah. And that's the proof that they sunk because they're all underwater.
Almost all of them are underwater, except the last eight.
Only these eight, the Hawaiian islands in modern day.
These eight are above water, but the other thousand or hundreds,
I don't know how many are all underwater.
That's why you can't see them if you fly over them.
But if you look at a geomorphic bathymetry map of the ocean,

(43:30):
then you can see it where they've done scans.
You know, they have instruments where they can map the ocean floor.
You can see all these volcanoes and they're they're in a perfect line, too.
It's not like they're random.
And the other amazing thing, like I said earlier, the line,
the plate changed motion.
It was it was drifting this way and then it went this way.
So the coming off Alaska, they're come down straight north south.

(43:53):
And then when they get to the middle of Pacific, they're northwest, southeast.
It's really cool.
And, you know, I don't know if you know this, but they say the ocean
is less understood and explored than space
because we can see with the with the telescopes.
We don't really know that much about the bottom of the ocean.

(44:14):
And anyway, it's just it's a fascinating thing.
And I don't again, not to everyone from it fascinates me.
But yeah, I'm enjoying what we're what we're talking about.
So this is probably going to be we're going to jump a little bit more
into like elementary stuff.
Sure. But so sure, volcanoes are created from the tectonic plates,

(44:35):
like gliding because I know that's how earthquakes happen.
Is that how basically the overall global thing is the earth is cooling
and it's really hot in the middle.
You know, the metal liquid core and the mantle in theirs.
So it's like it's like taking bread out of the oven or something.
It's hot and it's cooling down.

(44:55):
And if you could if you look at it with a temperature,
the air, the cooling, it's coming out.
But the way the earth cools, one of the ways is through volcanoes.
So it's the earth is cooling.
So the source of the heat is deep in the earth and the mantle,
the mantle core boundary.
And then the mantle becomes magma when it gets up to the surface.

(45:17):
So it has the plates are just the overprint of what's happening.
The plates are moving around.
So it's like having the geyser or like an open like a
it's like opening a fire hydrant, right?
And then sliding something over it.
The water is just blasting out.
The lava is blasting out of that fire hydrant.
If you're moving a plate over it, it blasts out.

(45:38):
Then it moves over, blasts out more.
That's the hot spot model with the Hawaiian Islands
moving over that hydrant of magma coming out.
And it's so established.
I mean, you know, a million years of the same spot in Hawaii.
I think there's some talk of hot spots can move a little, but not much.
You know, it's just this is the big plumbing system

(46:00):
for the hot spot of the Hawaiian Islands and there are other ones.
It's not the only one.
But the plate motion is different.
That's where the whole thing is.
You know, it's making ocean crust.
That's a long line of volcanoes.
It's not a volcano.
It's like a spreading system.
It's like if you were making two pieces of bread in an oven next to each other

(46:20):
and they keep coming out, they keep forming along a line.
And it's hard to explain, but.
Yeah, so the plates are moving, but like the the hot spot is stationary.
So I get what you're saying.
So is it is it just like the volcano is created
because it's an event for the magma, because it's so hot that like it's

(46:43):
like all that pressure is just like and it found a weak point to come out of.
Exactly. It is an established a pathway, a plumbing system
in terms of a hot spot.
Again, hot spots only one way.
These other ways are the two plates.
Plates can new plates form.
So here's my left hand is one plate.
My right hand is the other.

(47:04):
And as they form from the middle of the ocean, they keep making more.
They keep going out like that.
You're making new.
But also when they collide, that's another way when they two of them hit.
Sometimes they hit and go up and they make a mountain like the Himalayas.
That's two plates colliding mountain making.
But sometimes the plates collide and one goes under the other

(47:26):
and it melts and it makes a volcano.
So it's a real I mean, they didn't even know about plate
tectonics till like 50 years ago, 40 years ago.
No one even figured that out that the whole plates are sliding around.
Now it seems obvious with all the evidence, like hot spots
lining up all the way to Alaska.
You know, so it's really again, in terms of human knowledge,

(47:48):
it's all kind of recent.
Everything seems so obvious in hindsight.
You're like, oh, of course, of course, that's why.
Like, that's why things are the way they are.
But yeah, until, you know, it's just like, yeah, it's a mystery.
Right. I always think about that, especially back in.
What was cool about Sicily is the Greek and Roman ruins were there.

(48:08):
So you're wondering what were these old timers
thinking about thousands of years ago?
You know, when they're those philosophers, Aristotle and Plato
and all these guys were and women, I guess, were looking to the skies
and the ocean and the volcanoes and trying to figure out what's going on.
You know, nowadays we have all this instrumentation and knowledge.

(48:28):
I always kind of admire the people that came earlier
that knew less, but thought bigger in some respects.
You know? Yeah.
The first people to actually kind of put it together.
I heard there's some ancient I think it was Greek philosopher.
He's the first one who figured out that

(48:49):
like a big rain in the rainy season would amount to a really big harvest.
So once he put that together, he bought a whole bunch of like all of
I don't know if they're called orchards,
but he bought a whole bunch of them before.
And like a really big rain right before the harvest.
And then like he got rich because like he knew because of the big rain.

(49:12):
There's going to be a big harvest.
So it's just funny.
Well, I mean, it is it's all it all comes back to science.
So sometimes it was frustrating as an inventor to think
everything good has been invented already.
But that's not true.
I mean, yes, that's true in terms of a lot of the basic stuff.
But there's still opportunity to come up with new stuff.
Oh, yeah. Yeah.

(49:33):
I just think all the innovation
and even innovating what we already have on top of it
before Einstein came on the in the picture in the physics, a physics world.
They were like, oh, we kind of got everything figured out.
Like once he came with like relativity and just how
like perfectly he encapsulated the world and the universe.

(49:54):
And then he also came out with quantum physics, quantum mechanics.
And now everyone, even Einstein himself was like, this makes no sense.
I want no part of this world.
Nothing makes sense.
Two things can be true at the same time.
And yeah, I think it's the same thing with with innovation.
You just have to find like new perspectives and how to look at things.
And there's going to be new. Right.

(50:16):
We definitely haven't figured out so much,
even to what you're talking about with the ocean.
We haven't even discovered.
I think I think we explored like was like 10 percent
maybe being generous of the ocean.
We've barely discovered anything there.
To me, if you if you really meet good scientists,
they'll always tell you they know less than the more you know, the less you know.

(50:38):
You know, and even when I was doing my PhD,
I thought I was going to be so smart at the end.
I'm like, I realize how much I don't know.
And even now, I'm not really in this world so much.
But thinking about it, it's still kind of wide open.
I mean, I know a bunch of things that have been proven,
but there's still so much that hasn't.
And I'm not arrogant enough to say I know everything.

(51:00):
And that's why when you meet humble scientists
that have achieved something in their own right,
yet still acknowledge that there's still lots of you to learn that those like
Einstein, you know, he was the first to admit he didn't understand this.
And there's so much more to learn.
So it's the people that say they know everything.
Those are the ones to be wary of.

(51:20):
Those are the ones that you think and say thanks.
Like, I'm not now.
I know I don't have to pay attention to you because exactly you said.
It's just everything.
Every bit of information, it's a drop in a bucket like you just you don't know.
And there's so much information out there.
That's why it's so fun to be able to talk to so many different people
with so many different expertise.
You just get to gather the knowledge and learn.

(51:41):
So what can we learn from studying volcanoes?
Like what bigger implications can we learn about the earth
or even like the nature of volcanoes from studying volcanoes?
Well, I mean, first, the people that ask quick,
the most common question is, can we predict them to save people?
And they have, I mean, they have ways like monitoring the tilt

(52:04):
or the inflation rates or the seismic earthquakes.
Those are all indicators of an impending eruption.
But those, like I said earlier, the more the mellow eruptions,
the explosive ones don't give us such good data all the time
of when they're going to erupt.
But just overall, you start to understand the process of how the earth's formed,

(52:24):
how other planets form.
And again, I am even more intrigued by the result of the volcanoes.
And sometimes, you know, even in Hawaii, you go to the big island
and it's all black lava.
And then all of a sudden you see a little plant sprouting up.
It's like, wow, you know, there's life comes from them
because of the nutrients they deliver.

(52:44):
They're taking the nutrients out of the middle of the earth
and putting it on the surface of the earth.
So I think there's a lot to learn from that.
But one of the problems I had with science in general and academia in general
is you're working your whole life and you're trying to contribute something,
but it may not matter, you know, and it's kind of frustrating.
You want to do stuff that matters, maybe.

(53:06):
And you also don't know what may be important in the future.
It's basic science research.
So you're piling up a bunch of data and results, but no one cares.
But someone may care.
Maybe what you're doing is important.
Maybe what you're doing isn't important.
And that vagary was always troubling to me because I feel like, wow,

(53:28):
I'd rather do something or pursue something that I know is important.
I mean, we still need basic science, but it's hard.
I'm more of an applied science person.
Just to your question, what what can it do for me?
What can it do to humans?
What problem can I solve that's relevant?
I'd rather do that because unfortunately, in science, you get it to be

(53:51):
it's like a little boys club where this is my area of expertise.
I study Galapagos submarine volcanoes, and that becomes my little area.
But that is just kind of it's almost selfish.
I mean, it's cool.
But how important is that in the global thing,
you know, the global world of understanding?

(54:11):
So I don't it's a tricky one.
So I don't know.
That's a vague answer because I really don't I don't know.
Yeah, I think understanding more about the world around us.
I think any time you can really like have an interest and follow it
and learn from it and contribute to it, because let's just take, for example,

(54:32):
like where you are and the and the See/Rescue that you created.
So there's someone out there that followed his passion.
You said his name was Christo.
So Christo is an artist following his passion.
And he created a wrap around Miami.
And so out of that, what happened?

(54:52):
An unforeseen positive outcome of him doing that and everything else.
We have no idea.
But there is a multiple people alive today because Christo made that art.
So when you follow your passion, when you follow what interests you,
like there's there's other creativity that will come from that other knowledge
that will come from that.

(55:13):
And it's just, yeah, even if for no other reason that like,
I just really want to understand the submarine volcanoes around Galapagos
and different kind of magma that it produces compared to other areas of the earth.
But yeah, there's just it's something so I love that.
I love when people follow their passions to throw back a little bit.

(55:35):
Like you said, for your doctor, you were blasting lasers
at little air bubbles in magma.
So there's different compositions of magma.
Yes, yes, yes.
Again, so back to the ice cube analogy, you're making in the magma chamber.
You're making minerals.
Minerals are growing out of the magma chamber.

(55:55):
It's like making an ice cube.
You're making the water into solid.
It's going to be solid when it erupts.
It's liquid in a magma chamber.
Everything's liquid.
But as you're growing the crystals, little particulates
get frozen like a air bubble.
And it could be a fluid inclusion or a melt inclusion.
So what freezes in there is melt, which is like glass.

(56:19):
So there's a little glass bubble in the mineral.
And the glass bubble is the exact composition
of that magma chamber of that, because that's what was forming.
There's no contamination from outside air or other crust
melting and mixing with it.
It's frozen in there.
And people looked at these years ago and the Russians were big on these inclusions.

(56:43):
And for my master's, actually, I looked at the fluid inclusion.
So when it's a liquid bubble, we were I studied a gold deposit in Nova Scotia,
Canada, and we looked at the gold deposits and looked at the
the amount of H2O or sulfur in it.
It kind of tells you something about the quartz vein that holds the gold.

(57:03):
But then in the melt inclusion, the lavas, they form a piece of glass
or the composition of the mantle.
And then when we blast them with the laser, it excites them.
And then you can analyze.
So you're analyzing something that's as big as the tip of a pin,
pin size, but it's very pure.
So it gives a very realistic composition of what the magma chamber

(57:27):
looked like below the surface.
And again, that may be boring to most people.
And it doesn't change.
It doesn't solve cancer or world peace.
And that's one thing that gets frustrating because this is to me,
it was a big breakthrough.
And just to go deeper into it,
the Galapagos Spreading Center that I studied, sometimes spreading centers

(57:48):
get longer and sometimes they die.
So it's like a tear in your shirt.
If you have a shirt and you're tearing it, then all of a sudden the tear stops.
So it's a it's a dying rift.
It's a dying tear as it dies.
We thought when I became a student that the composition of those tears

(58:08):
would be more evolved, a different composition because it was cooler.
But what we found is as it dies,
the last pulses come from deep within the earth and are much more primitive.
Again, no one really cares, but us geologists care.
So by analyzing those little melt inclusions,
we were able to really focus in on that problem.

(58:31):
Again, I don't know if that makes sense to you or if you care.
There's too many qualifiers.
You think people don't care. I definitely care.
I mean, I'm drowning a little bit because like this is new information,
but like I'm really enjoying learning.
And it makes sense that like, of course, volcanoes
from different areas of the world would be like the magma that comes out of it

(58:54):
would be composed of different like elements, minerals, the contents.
Like that makes sense.
But to me, I just I never would even think about it.
I would just think like, oh, it's kind of all the same because it's all magma.
But like, yeah, I'm missing a huge piece of information not knowing that.
Right. And as it cools, the composition keeps changing on the surface

(59:15):
of the earth, it's changing and water.
It's raining or other gas flows through it or it's cooling.
So it's never you want a window deep into the earth.
And that's what those little bubbles give you those little inclusions.
And again, I wasn't the first to look at them.
These Russians were into them.
And I was the first to use that machine at MIT, the iron probe.

(59:38):
And that thing, instead of blowing them up, we excited them.
But you're able to look at trace elements like strontium and barium or rubidium.
You know, these are table chemical chemical elements on the
periodic chart of elements.
And because we could get exact compositions of strontium to rubidium,

(59:58):
the ratio of those two, we had never seen such a primitive composition,
meaning it's really from deep in the earth.
It's not from something that just cooled on the surface.
And that was new information.
And no one had used the iron probe.
And this this is one of the other things that changed me because the guy at MIT,

(01:00:19):
I had to beg him to let me use his instrument.
And then when he saw the results, he became the big leader of this kind of work.
And then he never gave me credit.
I'm like, OK, another negative for academia.
Nice. That's that's always fun when you get to interact with those people.

(01:00:41):
Yeah. And there's a saying, which is kind of a negative to academia.
But now that I'm out, I can use it, which is the reason the academia
arguments are so big is because the stakes are so small.
It's a joke. You know, you argue about something, but it doesn't really mean much.
So I know it's it's a put down.

(01:01:01):
And, you know, as an academia guy, it's it's self-deprecating.
But I'll own it.
The other thing that I didn't like about Ph.D.
program is at one point they have comps.
You have to take comprehensive tests to pass.
It's almost like a club and they don't let you in till they haze you.

(01:01:22):
So I didn't really like that.
And I don't like the way they kind of the grad students, the young guys.
I was young at the time, have all these new ideas.
These old professors, I just think in the continuum of human aging,
your good ideas happen when you're younger.
There are not many great old inventors.
You know, the real the real breakthroughs come from young people usually.

(01:01:47):
So I think what happens, a lot of professors end up stealing their grad
students ideas or taking credit for it.
That was another thing that always bothered me.
And that didn't happen in my case, per se, a little sideways,
but not my professor, but this guy at MIT.
And it's just it's just but it all, you know, that happens for a reason.
And it got me out of it.
And the other thing about academia is if you get a Ph.D.

(01:02:11):
in one place, they encourage you to go somewhere else.
And, you know, I grew up in Miami and I wanted to be a surfer.
And I got to and I wanted to work on volcanoes.
So when I got to Hawaii and I was like
a limpid stuck to a rock, you weren't getting me out of here.
And to get a job in academia,
they want me to go be a professor at the University of Nebraska,

(01:02:34):
which is fine for some people.
But for an ocean lava volcano surfer, I got to stay here.
So I was forced to be entrepreneurial, really, to be able to survive here.
So there was also that.
It's crazy.
I think there's pros and cons to academia.
Obviously, you don't get to learn if there's no institution,
but you get to a point, like you were saying, where the old guard,

(01:02:58):
it kind of keeps information and says, no, this is how it is.
So looking at like the magma composition,
like you said, those little little glass bubbles.
If the old guard said like, no, that that's just an artifact from magma.
We don't even we don't even have to look at those.
It takes someone like new to go look and say like, no, this is actually very valuable

(01:03:19):
because this is giving us a little a little timestamp, a little freeze frame,
like the purest form of what this actually is.
And so, yeah, you don't know what you don't know.
And you hope that there's people who are in the upper rungs of the echelon
that still have an open mind and will let new ideas flow in.

(01:03:40):
Because I think that's kind of stunts innovation.
Definitely, definitely.
And you still have to prove it, though.
I mean, just because you have an idea and the scientific method is still valid.
So these little bubbles are important, but you got to show they're important
and you got to reproduce your results and show
how important they can be across the board.

(01:04:01):
And that's what, you know, it's this chicken in the egg.
If you don't analyze them, you're never going to know if they are important.
And that's why when I was trying to explain to this MIT guy
that we need to study these, he was very reluctant because no one had done it.
Like, well, that doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
So that was frustrating.
But it finally convinced them.
And then, of course, and he'd become a reformed sinner.

(01:04:23):
It's like, OK, I know these are no good, no good, no good.
Oh, wait a second. These are great.
I'm going to be doing this the rest of my life.
And he got I think he got a new professorship over that field.
He became the expert in that, which if you fast, if you go backwards enough,
he didn't want to do it.
I had to beg him to do it.
And that was it was enlightening.
You know, people tell you who they are.

(01:04:45):
Listen to them. You know, people tell you stuff all the time.
I always tell that to my kids. Yeah.
Yeah. Those those negative experiences.
Yeah, they're drivers. They drive you.
Yeah. Yeah.
You can you can learn a lot from the positive and negative experiences
as like you're studying, like different areas of the world and all that.

(01:05:06):
How does the earth have the different compositions that it that it does have?
Like you said, you studied like you're in a gold
like quarry or. Yeah.
Quartz veins in Nova Scotia.
How does that come to be on on earth?
Is it something is it coming out of the earth?
Is it just all meteorites that have these elements that are hitting the earth?

(01:05:28):
How does the earth have so many elements?
I think it's all coming from inside the earth,
and that's why the volcanoes are delivering it.
But then you rework it.
So just like what's happening now with they're trying to open
the ocean floor to mining, there's all these they call the manganese nodules.
There's all these little balls on the bottom of the ocean in certain areas,

(01:05:50):
and you can mine them for rare earth metals,
which we need for like electric cars and computers.
So there's the output like, for instance, there's volcanoes
and then there's geothermal vents.
A lot of it is is the water pattern, right?
The cooling of the earth.
Have you ever seen those two worms or black smokers
where the ocean floor crust is cooling and water?

(01:06:14):
Hot water is going out and it's it's just pumping out black smoke.
Yeah, that's actually very popular in Galapagos.
It's not near where we were because it already cooled.
But as the lavas, the ocean floor is cooling waters,
that water circulating.
That's also why the inclusions were so important because they weren't,
you know, contaminated by this water cycle.

(01:06:36):
All the water cycles of the earth, whether they're rivers like panning for gold.
The gold is in the mountains from all these formations of ocean
floors or crustal formation, but the water is concentrating it.
Because the water is going around all these different bends
and the gold is getting concentrated in the river.
Same with the quartz veins that I worked on.

(01:06:57):
It's fluids moving through these rocks and the metamorphic rocks
means you're changing the igneous rocks of the original.
Then you metamorphose them with high temperature and pressure.
And then sedimentary is the last phase which you're raining on them
and putting waterfalls and different ways of redistributing it.
So like panning for gold, the globe, the earth is like one big pan.

(01:07:19):
And you're panning and moving stuff around.
But the main mover is usually is originally lava.
And then it's water, water, water and wind move things around.
And it concentrates things.
And there's chemical reactions where things precipitate out,
like those nodules on the bottom of the ocean.
Again, I'm not up on all the different chemical combinations of how things form.

(01:07:42):
But I think initially it's almost all volcanic, really,
because the earth is volcanic.
That's igneous rocks, igneous for the original rocks.
And everything else gets reworked.
And minerals are just rocks.
I mean, that's minerals.
That's just where the valuable minerals, they're in rocks.
They don't come down.
You know, there's not just gold floating around.

(01:08:04):
It gets displaced through processes.
So it's usually in fluid, but it has to get precipitated out.
So there might be a lot of gold in a vein, a quartz vein, a fluid.
But then all of a sudden, the conditions are right to form it more.
So it becomes more solid or gets more concentrated.

(01:08:24):
Yeah, it can happen with a lot of different processes.
Yeah, I always kind of just like wondered about that,
because I've heard that all the earth's water is from like meteorites
hitting the earth and them having frozen ice on them.
And then like we just have a lot of water just because we've been impacted
so many times, and it just kind of got me thinking about like different elements
like lithium, gold, copper, iron, all the different elements.

(01:08:48):
I was like, well, how does how does how does that happen?
Can precipitate out of the water.
I think it's the other way around.
It's mostly comes from solid.
I mean, it's liquid in the form of magma.
And if you think of the earth as they say, it's an iron nickel core,
but there's a liquid core.
So there's like liquid, liquid metal down in there.
And then it evolves out to the mantle where it's a mixture of liquid and solid.

(01:09:13):
And then it erupts out through magma chambers that are liquid initially.
But then when it gets.
But that's because it's so hot down there and the pressure and the heat
like diamonds, when it when it gets shot to the surface,
it gets the pressure gets reduced a lot getting to the pressure
to the earth's surface and the temperature gets reduced.
And then it forms a solid when you get to that form,

(01:09:35):
that temperature pressure status.
So it's it's it's very much a chemical reactions
with, I guess, physical, too.
I mean, it's complicated.
I mean, but I think the origin of it, I would still I still would say
based on what I've seen in my life in Hawaii, Italy, Iceland,
these such nutrient rich places in the middle of nowhere.

(01:09:58):
How can that be?
It has to be delivered from below.
No meteor hit Hawaii.
And there's flowers, there's fish, there's animals, all this.
It's just a lot.
There's a lot of life here.
And Italy, too.
You go there and it's just the flowers and the plants are just so robust.
And even, you know, even places all gold deposits, iron deposits.

(01:10:20):
There are a lot of them are associated with volcanoes
and diamonds are from kimberlites.
These are high pressure, like volcanic, cylindrical volcanic offshoots.
The kimberlite pipes are like dikes that form.
So everything is delivered from within the earth.
I mean, I'm sure there's some component delivered from meteor hits,

(01:10:40):
but I can't believe that's I mean, you got to go all the way back
to the formation of the earth.
I don't know.
We're living in such a fluky place that there's there's even water or life.
Right. I mean, we're still trying to find it on other planets,
but it's really hard because maybe it's not that prevalent.
This is kind of going off of what we were saying earlier,
but I was wondering, why is the Earth's core so hot?

(01:11:04):
Why is it like thousands of degrees?
Like, how come it's just not like the crust?
How come like the core is the composition that it is?
I think the easy answer is the Big Bang.
When when all that exploded, it's still cooling.
And if you think about billions a year time scale instead of you see,
we're thinking about it in year time scale or 100 year time scale.

(01:11:26):
That's nothing compared to the billions of years that it's been around.
It's still cooling and it's cooling slowly.
And, you know, when it when it first formed,
I'm sure it was a lot hotter than it is now.
You know, and that heat is still coming out of the earth.
So it's still outgassing.
It's still cooling.
It's like taking the hottest piece of food out of your oven.

(01:11:46):
You can imagine.
And it's still cooling and it's cooling from the inside out.
That makes sense.
And this might be like a little bit out of your purview.
But why is it even hot in the first place?
Because of the Big Bang and all that energy that came.
But like, how did the earth come together?
This hot core, like, how does that even happen?

(01:12:07):
And that's the end of the conversation.
It was a fun one for me.
And I would have enjoyed hearing the answer to that question,
as well as a few other follow ups.
But the Internet had a different plan for us that day.
Through no fault of Rob's, this conversation was more challenging than other episodes.
Have you ever watched the news?
And the news anchor is talking to a field correspondent,

(01:12:30):
whether it's someone out in their local area in front of a traffic light,
in the middle of a storm or on the outskirts of a war zone.
There always seems to be a bit of lag between when the news anchor
asks a question and when the field correspondent answers.
That was how Rob and I were having our conversation.
Each question and answer had a gap time of about one to two seconds

(01:12:51):
because of the Internet connection.
And if I did my job correctly when editing the podcast,
the conversation should have a much more natural flow
than it did when we were having our chat in real time.
However, what you can't change in editing is how people respond
to an annoying situation like that, their tone, how questions are answered
and other nonverbal cues that would indicate the person is frustrated.

(01:13:13):
Rob's enthusiasm and kindness never wavered despite the technical difficulties.
When we did disconnect at what we know now to be the end of our conversation,
he stuck around for another five to 10 minutes trying to reconnect
and troubleshoot the issue before we both agreed to call it.
So I wanted to make sure to say an especially big thank you
and give him extra acknowledgement for his extra effort.

(01:13:37):
So thank you so much, Rob, for sharing your knowledge with us
and being especially patient in the face of a modern day frustration.
And if you want to learn more about Rob, check the show notes for this podcast.
I will include the links to his socials where to purchase his invention
the See/Rescue, along with a clip of his Shark Tank episode.
And if you want to watch the full episode, it's season eight, episode 20.

(01:13:59):
Thanks for listening, everyone.

(01:14:22):
Greetings, humans.
This is your galactic pal Zworlurg.
On behalf of me and my space bandits, I have an important message.
It has come to our attention that recently a certain anti
extraterrestrial abduction weight belt has become popularized.
We would ask that you immediately cease wearing this accessory.

(01:14:43):
It puts a lot of extra strain on our tractor beams,
at times completely nullifying them.
We appreciate your full cooperation in this matter.
Thank you. That is all.
Yours truly, Zworlurg. XOXO.
The Bureau of the Tinfoil Hats Anti-Extraterrestrial Abduction Weight Belt,
harnessing our world's forces to give you out of this world protection.

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21 - Explosions of the Earth, Breakthroughs of the Mind: Volcanoes and Rescue Innovation with Dr. Rob Yonover

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}21 - Explosions of the Earth, Breakthroughs of the Mind: Volcanoes and Rescue Innovation with Dr. Rob Yonover