Earth on the Rocks

Shelby: 00:07

Hi, folks, and welcome back to Earth on the Rocks, the show where we get to know the person behind the science. I'm your host, Shelby Rader, and joining us today is doctor Claudia Johnson. Claudia, welcome.

Claudia: 00:18

Thank you, Shelby.

Shelby: 00:19

So we're gonna get to know you over the course of this show over drinks. And so what would be your drink of choice for today?

Claudia: 00:27

My drink of choice is water. I love water.

Shelby: 00:32

Are you a room temperature water sort of person or a cold water?

Claudia: 00:36

Definitely room temperature water is my absolute favorite. When I come back from the field, I want nothing more than a huge glass of water that has no taste to it.

Shelby: 00:47

Yeah. I think water I'm also room temp for water, which I feel like is sometimes, you know, a a hot topic amongst people. Some people really feel strongly that they need cold water, but I'm I'm with you on that. That's a great drink any time of day, any day of the year. So, Claudia, you're also part of our department, the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, which is pretty diverse.

Shelby: 01:06

And you do some work that we have not yet really talked about on this show. So if someone were to ask you what sort of scientist are you, how would you answer that?

Claudia: 01:17

So I say that I'm a geobiologist. So I have a lot of training in the rock record in geology, undergraduate training, graduate training at master's and PhD level. I've looked at rocks in many, many parts of Central And South America, Mexico, many places in Europe. I lived in Puerto Rico for two years where I taught at the University of Puerto Rico and took students out in the field and taught them stratigraphy, sedimentology, paleontology. As a graduate student, I learned how to do research in siliciclastic rocks in the Western Interior Basin.

Claudia: 01:58

So we worked from shoreline to deep basin, deep basinal deposits, looked at and developed stratigraphic profiles from many locations in Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, New Mexico, Nevada. And then with my own personal graduate studies, I focused on carbonate rocks. So I was able to look at limestones in the Florida area, the Mexico area, Central America, and South America. So I feel like for my geology training, I have a very good sense of what the rocks contain and how to analyze them and how to interpret them in terms of depositional environments, relative ages of the rocks because I know a lot about invertebrate paleontology and index fossils and ages of fossils, so I can read the rock record pretty well. So that's the first part of a geobiologist.

Claudia: 02:52

The second part is the biology part. So during my undergraduate and graduate studies, I took a lot of biology classes in the biology department and paleontology classes in the geology department. So I was able to look at fossils, pretty much focusing on the marine realm all the way from the past to the present. And I went out into the field, and I took a lot of modern biology classes so I can understand high alpine lake ecosystems and what plankton tows were and how to analyze the organisms in the freshwater, high altitude lakes under the microscope and do the taxonomy of those. And I also became a scuba diver so I could look at modern reef ecosystems and understand the processes, mostly the biological processes that were going on there.

Claudia: 03:48

So that's the component of geobiology.

Shelby: 03:51

Yeah. And I think having both of those perspectives is a unique perspective, like I said, that we haven't had on the show yet, and allows you to do some work that really applies both ends of that spectrum in really meaningful ways. So before we get into sort of how you got into this field, can you tell us a little bit about now what are some of the the things you're focused on? What are some of the big science questions Oh. That you're interested in trying to answer?

Claudia: 04:17

Well, I'm very interested in preservation of ecosystems in the modern day and in the future. So I'm interested in knowing the phylogenies of organisms that inhabit, let's say, the marine ecosystem, the refill ecosystem.

Shelby: 04:33

For our listeners, can you tell us what you mean by phylogeny?

Claudia: 04:36

The ancestor descendant relationships. So, for example, corals that are making the modern reefs originated, about 225,000,000 ago as a major group. And the earth through two hundred and twenty five million years has changed quite a lot. There were plate tectonic movements, and those movements shed sediment into shallow water ecosystems that disturbed reefs. We also had thermal changes, for example, extreme warming, deep water cooling events that brought the waters from the deeper to the shallower waters affecting the biology.

Claudia: 05:16

So the backdrop is the earth changing. What I looked at is which of the lineages started out old and persisted through these environmental changes and that persist to today.

Shelby: 05:32

So which coral varieties are strong or resilient enough to have lasted this entirety of time that you're looking at where some of them died out for various reasons?

Claudia: 05:42

Exactly. That's exactly that. And so there must be some kind of strength of genetics and adaptability for them to have gone through those changes and are still persisting to today. So we wanna take those, and we wanna see which ones we can put out into the modern oceans and grow them on farms, coral farms, and then plant them into modern reefs today.

Shelby: 06:08

And if someone were to say, well, why why do we care so much about coral reefs? Why would we want to farm and then sort of re sustain them in the natural environment? What would you say to that?

Claudia: 06:19

Well, coral reefs, they comprise only a very, very small percentage of the global ocean sea floor, but they're really important because they are a very diverse ecosystem. What I mean by that is that they have shapes and sizes of the organisms, and there are not only corals, but there are sponges and echinoderms and shrubs and shrimps and lobsters and bryozoans. Everything pools together to build a structure that has relief over the sea floor, but not every one of those organisms has the same shape. They all have different shapes, and they grow as close to each other as they can.

Claudia: 07:01

So there are nooks and crannies and holes in the reef ecosystem, and fish come by and they deposit their eggs in those holes, and shrimps deposit their eggs in those holes as well. So the reef ecosystem acts as a nursery for all sorts of other organisms. Important to that is that many people in the world live near the coastlines, and they depend on the oceans for their protein source, I. E. Fish.

Claudia: 07:31

So having the reefs there provides a nursery for all of these fish. So that's an advantage to humankind. But probably one of the largest advantages is that the reefs occur offshore. And when we have hurricane force winds that are driving the surface currents and the the surface of the ocean and then slamming those ocean waves onto a coastline and causing lots of destruction. If we have a reef far out, the reef takes the brunt of the energy from those waves.

Claudia: 08:03

And then the waves come into the shore, and they don't do as much devastation on the land. So they protect our homes, our businesses. And as we all know, there are lots and lots of major cities that occur in the tropics right on the on the shoreline.

Shelby: 08:21

Yeah. So I think a lot of people, I would assume, think of coral reefs and, you know, have pictures in mind of, these are these really beautiful things that you can see in the shallow ocean, and maybe don't recognize how integral they are to all of these aspects you just mentioned, to our food sources, to businesses. There's an economic impact if we don't have those, to just sort of our modern way of life and and integral to the ocean as an ecosystem. And so these are really, really important things for us to understand and protect in some way.

Claudia: 08:51

Mhmm.

Shelby: 08:51

So what is a coral reef farm like? How does that work?

Claudia: 08:58

So just imagine you're on the on the land and you put your toes into the water. You're at the shoreline, and you can walk out, and you can have water to your chest depth. And then if you walk out with a snorkel, you can go a little bit deeper. And if you put scuba on, you can go a little bit deeper. So you're in about 30 feet of water.

Claudia: 09:19

You've got lots of sunlight coming down. It's warm, shallow waters. So what people have done is they have anchored lines to the bottom of the seafloor, and those lines go vertically. So you have several vertical lines in a row, and then they're connected horizontally. So it forms a net.

Claudia: 09:39

And then they take the small corals that they've been growing in the laboratory, and they tie them to the net, and they let them grow for a couple of years. And then they take those little nubbins of corals and plant them. They glue them onto empty spaces of reef. So, now think about that. Gluing underwater is quite a process.

Shelby: 10:04

That is a process, I would imagine.

Claudia: 10:06

So, what you do is I forgot the name of the quarry. It's just north of Boulder, Colorado. It's one of the lion's cement quarries. But basically, they produce cement. So what you do is you buy a bag of this and you divide it into smaller little bags, like the bags we use for our sandwiches every day.

Claudia: 10:26

And so you put that powder in there. And when you get to the place where you wanna take that little nubbin and you wanna glue it to the calcium carbonate limestone substrate, you open that little bag of that powder and you have to grab it fast because that powder is being taken up into the water and carried by the currents really quickly. So it's a quite fun, fun process to do. Uh-huh. But importantly, when those little coral nubbins are on that fence underwater, you have to go out there with a brush and clean the algae off of them every day at least because algae, green algae and brown algae and red algae, they grow really quickly in the shallow water.

Claudia: 11:11

So when I was in Jamaica, we did an eight week course on basically reef ecosystems. And every week, we had a professor come down from The United States or Europe, and they taught us a phylum, like phylum echinodermata or phylum nidaria or all the sponges. But one professor came down and taught us about algae. So we had to go out into 30 feet, 60 feet, 90 feet, and a 20 feet depths, clear a one meter patch, and then go back the next day and with and document the types of corals that have grown on that one meter patch in twenty four hours and then forty eight hours. So that was very relevant to the modern reef coral growing because the algae grows on the corals real quickly.

Claudia: 12:04

So you have to take a brush or a toothbrush and and take that algae off. And the reason that's important is because the corals have a calcium carbonate stony structure, and they have, of course, soft tissues with tentacles and a mouth in the middle, and they have tissue. And in that tissue within and between corals live plants. So there's a symbiotic association between the coral animal and the algae, which is a plant. So the reason coral reefs are in shallow waters is because that algae needs that sunlight to photosynthesize, and the photosynthate product is given directly to the coral animal and is taken up by the animal, and it uses that energy to develop its tissue and then to precipitate its calcium carbonate shell.

Shelby: 12:57

But I'm assuming from what you just said, there's also sort of a threshold where if there's too much algae, that becomes problematic. Is that why you're having to go out and clean it

Claudia: 13:07

Well, if there if there is algae growing on the coral, then the tissue don't have the light available for the zooxanthellae plant to absorb the sunlight. Yeah.

Shelby: 13:20

Right. And then at what point do these sort of farmed corals reach a stage where you say, okay, now we're ready to move these and sort of establish them in a natural environment? And is that process similar? You're taking this little bag of of concrete and and gluing it down?

Claudia: 13:37

Are you Yep. Okay. That's it. Perhaps maybe not the first time, but one of the most famous times we've learned about this was I think it was back in the eighties or nineties when all the world knew what a tsunami was because there was a very, very strong tsunami that hit Southeastern Asia and destroyed a lot of habitats and very unfortunately, and a lot of lives were lost. So after that tsunami, people took cement blocks and put them in the ocean, and they glued these little nubbins of corals on them.

Claudia: 14:11

And within two years, there was luxurious growth of corals. So it only took two years for these corals that have linear extension rates that grow 12 to 20 centimeters per year. And that's very different than the head corals, have volumetric growth, which grow about three to five centimeters a year. So these fast growing corals make all those nooks and crannies for the reef ecosystem to develop and become a nursery again. So it's pretty cool.

Shelby: 14:41

So when you say linear growth, I'm assuming you mean corals that are sort of growing outward and in a line.

Claudia: 14:47

In line, in a branch.

Shelby: 14:49

And then volumetric would be corals that are sort of growing in three dimensions. Yeah. Like a head of cabbage or something.

Claudia: 14:55

Exactly. A head of coral, head of cabbage. Yeah. Okay. They look the same.

Shelby: 14:58

Yeah. So you obviously do a lot of work underwater, which again is something that we have not yet heard about on this show. So what is that like? You've been trained in scuba for a while. Are there obviously, there are things you just mentioned that are more difficult underwater.

Shelby: 15:16

Are there other aspects of that that are very unique that you feel like maybe you didn't appreciate until you were having to do these things in scuba gear?

Claudia: 15:27

Neutral buoyancy. Yeah. Writing on a slate underwater. Yeah. Turning upside down and riding upside down while your scuba tank is on.

Claudia: 15:37

Yeah. All those are immeasurably fun. But what I have to do is thank my wonderful friend and my colleague, Charlie Beaker, who is the head of the Center for Underwater Science, and he is director of the academic diving program. So he and his wonderful group of teachers teach diving here at Indiana University. And I have the benefit of having those students so well educated and vetted for these international trips.

Claudia: 16:13

So I teach a course called Natural History of Coral Reefs. And the students come to my course and they learn about corals and the ecosystem. And then they go down with Professor classes and perform experiments underwater. So Professor Beaker and I have been working together about twenty years, and we work with a lot of students on the individualized majors program. And we have the undergraduates on particular cultural resources or biologically important areas, and we have them do experiments.

Claudia: 16:55

Basically, starts with documentation, and then we have them develop questions a little bit later once they get very comfortable with understanding all of their scuba safety requirements and then the research questions.

Shelby: 17:11

What an amazing opportunity to be in Indiana, which is not an area where you would think, oh, I'm gonna be able to scuba dive and be certified and then go out into these really beautiful oceanic settings and see these sorts of things. But what a great opportunity to be able to do that here. And like you said, be very well educated and very prepared and trained, and then get to go and see these things in person. I think that just would be such a fun experience for people to get to have.

Claudia: 17:37

No, it's a tremendous opportunity that Indiana University offers to its undergrads and grads. And the underwater science and the academic diving program have an excellent record of safety. So safety comes first in all of the projects we undertake. So, we work with environmental health and safety, and Sam Haskell is our person who is the dive safety officer for IU. So, within the Center for Underwater Science and the academic diving program, we all got together and wrote the dive safety manual for Indiana University.

Claudia: 18:15

So it is now policy at IU, which is, I think, a very, very cool accomplishment.

Shelby: 18:21

Yeah. Yeah. Something to be proud of. Mhmm. So you've done a lot of really interesting field work and you sort of listed a few areas early on that that I would imagine were really beautiful.

Shelby: 18:31

Are there any that that stand out either for the geologic side of what you do or for the biologic side? Are there dives that you've been on that were particularly impactful or field areas that you spent time in that really stood out to you?

Claudia: 18:46

Well, right now, I'm focusing not only on the reefs in The Caribbean, but I'm also working in Tanzania with my colleagues, my colleague Jackson Najal and Ed Herman. So, we have a wonderful opportunity to teach a course that is offered to any student across The United States who would like to participate and enroll through Indiana University. The opportunity to study the geology and the paleoanthropology and the geoarcheology of a world famous UNESCO World Heritage Site, which is Olduvai Gorge. And Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania is the site that Mary and Louis Leakey worked on in the 1930s and 40s, 50s, etcetera, etcetera, and were the people who found the morphological evidence for the evolutionary history of our ancestors and the geoarchaeological record to go along with that. So we at Indiana University have the opportunity to, through Jackson Njau's wonderful connections to take the students there and show them the geology of the East African Rift System, which is the splitting of the earth, the evolution and eruption of the volcanoes that have contributed sediments at the time that our hominid ancestors were evolving.

Claudia: 20:25

So for my part, I teach the geology. Jackson teaches the paleoanthropology. And Ed Herrmann has joined us recently to teach the geoarchaeology. So this is a course that the Stone Age Institute proposed quite a number of years ago, probably 2011, '20 '12. And they were the major financial contributors to the course, and they were the ones that really started it going for Indiana University.

Claudia: 20:56

So, we continuously thank them for their ideas, their contributions, their financial support, and for recognizing the importance, as they always do, for outreach of science. So I enjoy teaching the students in the field, i.e., the geo part of my training. So I myself had to rely on some of my colleagues in the geology department before I went out there because, as I said initially, I work on sedimentary rocks. But here at Olduvai Gorge were a lot of volcanic rocks. So I had to ask our colleague who you know very well, Elizabeth Kenderes.

Claudia: 21:39

"Elizabeth, help me with these volcanic rocks". And she did wonderfully by giving me lots and lots of samples and helping me out with identification charts. And then when we were out in the field, there was a graduate student, Danielle Peltier, who also helped me greatly in understanding the volcanic rocks again. She was extremely helpful. So what I'm saying by all of this is there's always learning going on no matter what level of academic achievement we have come to.

Claudia: 22:14

We always have to go back to the basics and learn and learn and learn, which I think is one of the most enriching parts of my career here at IU. It is just fantastic.

Shelby: 22:24

Yeah. I think that's part of why so many people that we've had on the show, myself included, love what we do because there is always this opportunity to learn from each other, to learn from students, to learn from people at every level. And that is so enriching. It keeps me on my toes. There's just this sort of energy, this buzz that comes with being with colleagues and with students in that capacity that I think would be hard to replicate.

Claudia: 22:52

I agree with you completely in that teamwork is so invigorating. Teamwork, as you just said, with students, with colleagues, it's on international expeditions, it's even better. Yeah. Because everybody really needs to work with the team. Safety always has to come first.

Claudia: 23:11

And then we proceed with the science and the questions and the data and the interpretations. Yeah.

Shelby: 23:18

Where where else have you you sort of done fieldwork, either on the geology or the biology spectrum? So you mentioned some dives in The Caribbean and this work in Tanzania.

Claudia: 23:30

Yeah. So I looked at mostly Mesozoic, Cretaceous, hundred million year old reefs that are now on land. So they were once covered by the ocean. They're exposed on land. I looked at them throughout Mexico, many countries in Central America, Northern South America, and Brazil to get a regional perspective of what the earth was like a hundred million years ago when when the climate was very warm and a lot of the earth was covered with shallow water seas.

Claudia: 24:06

Yes. And thus reefs proliferated.

Shelby: 24:08

I think that's a really important aspect to point out for listeners. Mhmm. People probably think of reefs exclusively in the modern environment, but here you're saying you're looking at hundred million year old reefs that at the time, hundred million years ago, would have been in a shallow ocean. But now because of the changing climate and the changing tectonics of the area are exposed on land, which is sort of a strange concept for people.

Claudia: 24:35

Mhmm. Yeah. That's very true. And these limestones, they're called limestone rocks. They're made out of calcium carbonate.

Claudia: 24:43

And it's those limestones that are exposed on land that are in quarries that we dig out, grind up, and make road surfaces from. And we also powder it when it's very pure limestone, pure calcium carbonate, and use it for our packaging of fertilizers and nutrients for the agricultural industry.

Shelby: 25:03

So a big, big cycle, a big global cycle of how all these things are used.

Claudia: 25:07

Yeah. Everything is from the earth and we utilize it in many innovative ways. I mean, right now we're, of course, looking at your area, which is all these rare earth elements, and where are they in the world and what are their geopolitical associations and which country is going to extract resources from their own interior versus others. So it's a big, big geopolitical question as to how we're going to drive our computers, our iPhones, and have sustainability with that type of technology, battery technology for electric vehicles as well?

Shelby: 25:50

Yeah. I teach a couple of classes that focus on these sorts of ideas. When we think of earth materials or earth resources, it can be anything from building materials, like you mentioned, you know, using these carbonate rocks as part of road work to electronic components to things for national security to energy production, and the distribution of them globally is not equal. So some areas are very concentrated in certain things and other areas are not. And it's not just the geologic implications of that.

Shelby: 26:26

So why do we see these concentrations in different areas? But also, like you highlight, sociopolitical issues. So what does global trade look like? Who is willing to be a partner with whom? Who isn't?

Shelby: 26:38

There's socioeconomic impacts. So some of these deposits are in areas where folks are very low income and so maybe are taken advantage of a bit in poor working conditions to extract these resources so that large companies can make a profit. So I think that's an important aspect of what all of us do in this field is not just look at things sort of in an isolated earth or atmospheric science bubble, but also understand the applications of that information, the implications of it for people outside of our field, for people in different geographic regions. And that's part of why I think the department and the work that we all do is really interesting because there's so many ways we can think about it and use it, but maybe isn't something that a lot of people really process on the day to day without having things like this where it's brought up.

Claudia: 27:30

Boy, you're bringing up so many really good, important points. And I think everybody in our department feels a pretty strong obligation to keep current on Earth's resources so that we can understand and help people know the importance of these particular lithium deposits or these garnets and diamonds, etcetera, etcetera, and what is happening with all of that in the world Yeah. Yeah. In the history.

Shelby: 27:59

And I think, you know, we also generally feel like it's really important to teach and train students in these sorts of things because it's so pertinent nowadays, especially. And you've mentioned a couple of times now about how important it is to you to get to work with students. So what is it about getting to train students, getting to be in the field with them that you find so rewarding?

Claudia: 28:23

With my PhD students, I absolutely love talking with them in-depth about their research projects and going into deep discussions on macroevolutionary processes or modern processes affecting reef ecosystems and how we analyze data to get there. With the undergraduates, I love the sense of watching them learn and listen and then take ideas and move them in their own particular direction. It is the most thrilling part of what we do as teachers and as mentors. And I'm finding that the more I teach in the classroom, the more I understand how to teach students. In other words, to really look at them and try and assess if they are grasping the information that is 100% clear to me and I've just put together so beautifully, and I'm finding that, wow, I need to go back and look at this component and this component and redo it.

Claudia: 29:42

So, the joyful components of it are in-depth discussions and, as they say, the light bulb of learning. And then my own critique of my own teaching and way of communicating with the undergraduates is really coming to light very often for me now. As I know the content very, very well, now I am very grateful for the courses in pedagogy I took at Seidl and all of the exercises that they had me go through for my own teaching, I'm finding years later that I'm still integrating what I learned. One of the most important things I learned about teaching is whoever is doing the work is doing the learning. So that allowed me to help transfer activities to the students in the classroom and help them individually or in small groups.

Shelby: 30:41

Well, I think that's another aspect of this idea of we all, you know, are continually learning, even when it comes to how we're teaching too. You know, there's an evolution there from semester to semester, from year to year, to sort of better frame what you're trying to present, to better engage with students, to find ways to get them more engaged in the material. And yeah, I think that's part of what is fun and enjoyable too, because there's always this opportunity for growth there.

Claudia: 31:12

And as students are learning their voice, we as teachers are also learning our voice in how to present and how to listen. Yes. Oh my goodness.

Shelby: 31:24

Which is a very important aspect.

Claudia: 31:26

We are both shaking our heads at each other. Listening and not interrupting. Woah. Takes a lot of self discipline.

Shelby: 31:33

It does sometimes. So what was it when you were a student that sort of got you into this field? What was the light bulb moment for you?

Claudia: 31:46

I was such a shy student. I was terrified of raising my hand in the classroom. However, when I was introduced to geologic history of reefs, everything became understandable to me. Everything became easy. Everything became exciting and interesting.

Claudia: 32:05

I was at the University of Missouri. I still remember sitting in the classroom in Columbia, Missouri and learning from my professors about ancient ecosystems and especially the reef ecosystem. And at that point, everything changed for me. It just clicked. It clicked.

Claudia: 32:25

I started raising my hand. I started talking. I was no longer afraid. It was very fun. How about you?

Shelby: 32:32

It was sort of similar. So I I started in undergrad as a pre med major, and so I had a long history of sports injuries, and so that aspect of medicine was always really interesting to me. So I had this idea that that's what I wanted to do. And so I'd I'd taken lots of pre med courses at this stage, so pretty deep into biology, pretty deep into chemistry, did some physics.

Shelby: 32:57

And I took a geology class because I needed another STEM credit. And up to that point, you know, lot of times those early pre med courses, there's so many students that are taking them. They're what are often referred to as weed out courses. And so they're not terribly engaging. You know, they're pretty large.

Shelby: 33:17

I found a lot of the students were fairly competitive too. You know, everybody has this aspiration that they're gonna be the top of the class so they can get into their school of choice. So I take this geology class, and the professor was excited about what he talked about every day. It didn't matter what the topic was. He was sort of on another level for every lecture.

Shelby: 33:40

He could bring in things that we could hold and see. We could go outside and look at these sort of things. And sort of the vibe of the students was also a lot more laid back. You know, we were friends and we were sort of working together and and that just drew me in. But even then, there was still a period of time where I knew I liked geology and I took more geology classes and still had really excited professors and that really was engaging.

Shelby: 34:07

But I wasn't completely sold that that was what I wanted to do. So the school I went to did a lot of sedimentary rock work, which I think because there was so much of that exposure in that program, it was sort of commonplace to me because you see it so often. And so I wasn't sure that that's what I wanted to do. And then I started doing research with a faculty member that was doing a lot of sort of geochemistry. So he was synthesizing or growing his own minerals and then chemically manipulating them after you crystallized them.

Shelby: 34:45

And that was really what what did it for me. So I I got to go into this lab, you know, you're mixing liquids that are different chemical forms. You put them in an oven, a fancy oven, not, you know, like a kitchen oven. And when you pull them out, you have made something out of nothing. And that was just a totally new experience, and it sort of brought in the chemistry component that I had been enjoying from the pre med work and this very applied geology component, and it had real world applications.

Shelby: 35:19

So the big picture goal there was to try to see if we could make these crystals, these minerals, that could help capture radioactive waste and store it in a way that it was safe and essentially neutralized. And so I could go to my friends who weren't in geology or go to my parents and say, hey, this is what I'm working on, and they could understand why that could be useful. And that was something that felt just really fun. And so it was really working with him, doctor Aaron Celestian, that, yeah, that made me think this might be something that I wanted to do. But I'm forever grateful to the faculty from that department for their excitement and enthusiasm, which is what really pulled me in.

Shelby: 36:00

And I think that that is what I've observed with lots of of earth and atmospheric science folks, especially here, but not just here at IU, elsewhere. Like, we really love what we do, and it's it's infectious.

Claudia: 36:13

A couple of things you touched on that I wanna highlight, and that is I love that you were able to talk to your parents and your friends about what you do. That is so cool. So right away, you understood the connection of what you were studying in science to society, which is fantastic. And your enthusiasm with which you told that part of the tale was just lovely. And the other thing is the integration of chemistry and biology and physics is just a delight in the geological sciences.

Claudia: 36:43

And now with the atmospheric sciences and scientists that we have the pleasure of being with and listening to in their colloquia presentations and in the wonderful way that they talk in faculty meetings and take the conversation in a different direction than geologists do. So it's all enriching for us. It's lovely.

Shelby: 37:07

Yeah. And I think that geosciences, earth and atmospheric sciences are really a mechanism to apply all of these other STEM fields. You know, I think a lot of times folks outside of the geosciences think, well, these people just are obsessed with rocks, which in some cases maybe is true. But there's so many other ways that you can bring in other STEM components to look at the physics of things, look at the chemistry of the earth, to look at the math and how things are working in tandem with one another. I think all of those make it really engaging for me and hopefully for others.

Shelby: 37:45

I mean, that's part of our goal with what we do and with what we're teaching is to try to convince students that, Hey, this is sort of a worthwhile endeavor. There's something to be learned here and there's something to be applied here.

Claudia: 37:58

And the extension into instrumentation such as in your field, which is fantastic, to teach the students how to prepare samples, how to analyze them on the instruments, and how to evaluate the results is pretty amazing. Yeah. We're doing a technology association as well through the Center for Biological Research Collections. So, we have the wonderful fortune at Indiana University of having the IU paleontology collections. And we have several million fossil specimens in our repository on the Fifth Floor of the Geology Building.

Claudia: 38:40

And so we use these fossil specimens for research all the time. It is like our instrument lab. Our instruments are the fossils. So we're trying to connect with technology to develop a digital platform to teach the students how to image the specimens, measure them volumetrically, and of course their 2D dimensions. And also how to do photogrammetry such that we can have 3D digitization of these specimens and put them on websites such that our fossils, our rich heritage, our history of biological evolution in the state of Indiana is available to the school students in the state of Indiana to their teachers.

Claudia: 39:28

So everybody has access to the same information. So I love that outreach of instrumentation and in the AI digital platform component. So we're lucky. I mean, we get to expand and extend in any way possible here at IU. We're Yes, we are.

Shelby: 39:48

We're very lucky. I feel like, you know, some of those things you just mentioned, it's really skill building for students. I think sometimes maybe we all lose track of the fact that it's not just skill building within a very niche field, like these are skills that can translate, you know, methods you just described photogrammetry, essentially making three d digital models of, in this case, specimens. But in other cases, you know, that could be used for all sorts of applications in academia, but also in industry. And those are really transferable skills that I feel like students have the opportunity to take advantage of.

Claudia: 40:26

We spoke a little bit earlier about our learning. So another thing I'm learning is when we teach these students skills, to have them write down what they are doing every day, every month. And then at the end of the semester, I help them categorize their skill sets and then put those categories into their CVs.

Shelby: 40:49

It's really That's fantastic. I think that that's something that we all should be doing because, yeah, in the moment highlighting how these skills can be useful is so important so that they grasp that rather than later on trying to think back and sort of reframe the work that they've done. I think that's a really great opportunity there.

Claudia: 41:08

One other thing I wanted to tell you that reminded me of how I got into paleontology, similar to how you got into minerals, is I was on a work study at University of Missouri, and my assignment was to clean out the fossils and minerals in the display cases. So I knew nothing about paleontology. I'd open these glass fronts in the hallway display cases, take out this bizarre looking thing. I had no idea what it was. It was all colored, different shape.

Claudia: 41:39

And I'd look at it, and I remember distinctly saying, wow. Whoever studies this stuff is really weird. And I guess I took out enough of those specimens that I kept looking at them and became extremely interested in them. You never know You never where your interest is going to come from. No.

Claudia: 41:59

It's pretty bizarre.

Shelby: 42:00

If someone listens to this episode and thinks, well, maybe I'm interested in these really weird things that they're mentioning, what advice would you have for people about how they might pursue that interest?

Claudia: 42:13

Well, within the geological sciences, there are quite a number of us, tenure track, teaching track, research track faculty who have expertise in almost everything we display in our buildings. Our rock faces of serpentinite, the green rock when you walk in the geology building, somebody will know about that. If you look in our display cases, you learn about the atmosphere, you learn about the oceans, you learn about national parks, you learn about evolution and extinction. And I believe we still have a register of people's names there and room numbers and websites. We're current on our website.

Claudia: 42:54

So, we always encourage students to get in touch with anybody, and then we can connect them ourselves.

Shelby: 43:01

Yeah, think that's great advice. Reach out. I mean, we're we obviously, we love to talk about this sort of stuff. We have a whole podcast dedicated to it now. So reach out, you know, engage with us.

Shelby: 43:10

We would be happy to

Claudia: 43:12

Sounds great, Shelby. Great advice.

Shelby: 43:15

So, Claudia, that brings us to our last segment of the show, which is the Yes, Please segment, where we each get one minute to get on our soapbox and talk about something that we're excited by in the moment. Okay, so this is Doctor. Claudia Johnson's Yes, Please. You have one minute.

Shelby: 43:33

I met the most beautiful woman in the world.

Claudia: 43:37

I met her through the movie Barbie. At the end of Barbie, Margo what's her name? Margo

Shelby: 43:46

Robbie.

Claudia: 43:47

Robbie turns to an older woman on the bench and says, you are so beautiful. And the older woman said, I know. It was one of the most stunning moments I have ever seen in film. I didn't know who the woman was. Her name is Anne Roth.

Claudia: 44:05

She is a costume designer. She is a very famous costume designer for Hollywood. And I am also very interested in fashion. I follow the red carpet, wonderful whole picture all the And I started looking up a lot of designers, and she is now my hero. Anne Roth is her name. How about you?

Shelby: 44:30

That's incredible. So I also watched the Barbie movie and was a big fan. I didn't realize your interest in fashion sort of extended to things like the red carpet. So do you watch a lot of big event, like the Oscars just happened this past weekend?

Shelby: 44:45

Do you watch those sorts of things for the red carpet, or do you sort of

Claudia: 44:48

Yes. Oh, I'm very interested in the fashion. So Ariana Grande wore a Schiaparrelli design that my PhD student Samantha and I analyzed yesterday, because Samantha is a seamstress too. And we think that that structure is made out of scuba fabric. So there we come full circle.

Shelby: 45:10

That is amazing. I saw that dress because that was sort of, it was a a very popular dress for folks that were talking about the the Oscars. Never would have crossed my mind to think that that might have been made from scuba gear. That's really yeah. That's a really great tie in.

Claudia: 45:26

Well, Samantha enlarged that, and she said, that's gotta be scuba with some color on it. I think she was right.

Shelby: 45:32

And a good crossover from, you know, I think sometimes people feel like science is this sort of stuffy topic, but there are so many crossovers to things that are very everyday, which I think is a fun way to sort of think about

Claudia: 45:46

Art, color, everything. Okay. Yours?

Shelby: 45:48

Okay. Now let me set my timer. So this will be my my yes, please. So yes, please. I wanna give a shout out to local donuts.

Shelby: 45:58

So we have donuts and coffee every Friday as a department, and we sort of move around between different types of or different donut restaurants in town. My personal favorite is Crescent Donuts, which is a local donut shop. The reason I wanted to talk about this today is this past weekend, I'd gone to Bowling Green, Kentucky, which is where I did my undergrad at Western Kentucky University. And there is a donut shop there called GADS, which is short for the Great American Donut Shop. They have the best donuts that I think I've ever eaten, and maybe part of it is tinged by my fun memories whenever I was an undergrad.

Shelby: 46:33

And they particularly have delicious donut holes, which are my favorite variety of donuts. And when I was an undergrad, I would go there so often and order doughnut holes in very large quantities that they started referring to me as doughnut hole. So I would walk in and they'd say, hey, doughnut hole, you're back. So I wanna give a shout out to local donuts. And that ends my time, but I also wanna give one other shout out.

Shelby: 46:57

I'm from Kentucky, which is is known for the Bourbon Trail, probably one of the most prolific reasons that Kentucky as a state is known. We also have a doughnut trail that I think people should not overlook. It's not as highly publicized, but there are doughnut shops all local that sort of make their way through the areas where bourbon is very popular, so sort of Northern, North Central Kentucky, but also down into central, sort of East Central and West Central Kentucky too. So if you're ever nearby looking for sort of a day trip, do the Donut Trail in Kentucky, maybe do the Bourbon Trail. They could go well together, I don't know, but you definitely need a designated driver.

Shelby: 47:36

But the donut trail definitely should not be overlooked. And local donuts too. They're they're really good. You're the best,

Claudia: 47:42

Shelby. That's great.

Shelby: 47:44

Claudia, thank you so much for coming on. This has been a lot of fun. I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you, Shelby. And thank you to our listeners.

Shelby: 47:51

We hope to have you back next week when we have a new guest. We'll see you then. Earth on the rocks is produced by Cari Metz with artwork provided by Connor Leimgruber, with technical recording managed by Kate Crum and Betsy Leija. Funding for this podcast was provided by the National Science Foundation grant EAR dash 2422824.