IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
NATIONAL LIFE STORIES AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE Professor Stephen Sparks Interviewed by Paul Merchant C1379/89
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British Library Sound Archive
National Life Stories
Interview Summary Sheet
Title Page
Ref no: C1379/89
Collection title:
An Oral History of
British Science
Interviewee’s surname:
Sparks Title: Professor
Interviewee’s forename:
Stephen Sex: M
Occupation:
Volcanologist Date and place of birth:
15th
May 1949,
Harpenden,
Hertfordshire , UK
Mother’s occupation:
Housewife Father’s occupation:
Civil servant (valuer)
Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 18/10/12 (track 1-2), 19/10/12 (track
3-7)
Location of interview:
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol
Name of interviewer:
Dr Paul Merchant
Type of recorder:
Marantz PMD661
Recording format : 661: WAV 24 bit 48kHz
Total no. of tracks:
7 Stereo
Total Duration:
9:12:47
Additional material:
Copyright/Clearance:
Interviewer’s comments:
Stephen Sparks Page 4
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Track 1
4
Track 1
Could I start by asking you then when and where you were born?
I was born in Harpenden on 15th
May 1949, in Hertfordshire.
And anything you can tell me about the life of your father.
Yes, I can. My father was a civil servant most of his life. He worked for the Inland
Revenue, for their valuation office. Of course, his life was interrupted by the Second
World War, of course, and he – well, he served as – in the army and – but he spent
most of his life, as I say, in the valuation office and ended up as district valuer in the
sort of Peak District of Derbyshire.
And what did you come to know about his childhood, if anything?
A little bit. I mean, I know a fair amount. He was born in South Africa, Piet Retiet,
and when he was – I think he left – he has no memory – he had no memory of South
Africa. He’d left when he was two and came back here in his – he – the family comes
from a long line of clergymen so his father was a clergyman and therefore moved
round the country. I know they lived in Portsmouth for quite a while and then they
moved up to Yorkshire, near Bradford, and I think they then moved into sort of the
north of London, to a place called Northaw, round there. So he had a sister [Gabriel],
who he was very close to, a younger sister, quite a lot younger than him, who died of
leukaemia when she was in her thirties. So, you know, I – so, you know, as far as I
recollect – he died sort of twelve or thirteen years ago now [13 November 1995] and
he was – he was – my impression is he must have had a sort of reasonably happy
childhood and he was a sort of – an amateur but a fairly good musician, so – and that
– so he played the church organ and he used to play in jazz bands and things [He has
his own jazz band called Ken Sparks and the Livewires]. So he was – yes, so I – as
far as I remember of what he told me, it was a sort of fairly happy childhood. [He was
also close to his other sister Joan throughout his life.]
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[2:26]
And the life of your mother?
I don’t know so much about my mother, she died when I was twelve and she did have
some sort of [mental] health problems. And she was a twin. She came from a place
called Northaw, again in Hertfordshire, north of London, and she was, as I say, a twin
from a really large – quite a large family [2 sisters and a brother]. And they – I guess
they married sometime in the early ‘30s. My father was born 1912 actually, yeah, so
that would have been in the early ‘30s [actually 30th
April 1937: later than I
remembered]. Yeah, so I don’t – and I don’t recollect so much about her because, as I
say, she died when I was twelve and she’d been in and out of hospital, so she was – I
didn’t see her particularly when I was – perhaps [during] her last few years, I didn’t
see quite so much of her. So I was sort of brought up in a sort of bachelor household
in a way. I have a brother, an older brother [Marshall].
[3:29]
What time then did you spend with either set of grandparents, can you remember?
Very little. The only grandparent I spent – in fact I even remember much – I’m not
sure about the – I think they may have all died very early when there was – I very
vaguely remember my maternal grandmother but that must have been – I must have
been an infant, been very small, when she died. And then my father’s mother – we,
you know, ‘cause obviously he had to look after her when she got – and care for her
when she was old, was – I knew her till I was in my sort of teens, I would say about
sort of fifteen or sixteen, I think, when she passed away [my memory is inaccurate
here: she died in June 1973].
Do you remember anything in particular done with her or conversations with her or
…?
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Not a great deal. She was – she was a slightly – I think sort of difficult woman, as I
remember her, but of course that’s the sort of memory of a teenager rather than what
she was really like. But she was – she was in homes in Cheshire for a while and –
before she died. So I don’t remember an awful lot about her except that she was – she
was – I think she was quite a – the impression I got from sort of speaking to the
family was that she was quite a sort of controlling person and sort of liked to control
what my, you know, father did and didn’t do, even when he was in his sort of fifties
and sixties [laughs]. So I don’t really remember that much about her. She must have
died when perhaps I was sixteen or seventeen, something like that.
[5:23]
Thank you. Could you tell me – I realise that the time spent with your mother was
limited by the fact that she was, as you say, receiving care and that sort of thing.
Yeah.
But what memories do you have of time spent with your mother up to the age of
twelve, things done with her, places gone with her, to give us a –
Very little actually, very little, you know, and I don’t know why that would be. But,
as I say, she was – she did have sort of mental health problems. I know she was in
hospital a lot and she was, you know, certainly in the last few years of her life, she
was very ill. And so actually in practice I was brought up even from a very early age
by my father and my – with my brother. We lived in Chester. So I don’t, you know,
I’ve got pictures of her and of course I remember what she looked like, but I really
don’t remember hugely that much interaction with her actually.
Was she well enough to sort of take you to school and play with you?
I think when I was very young, yes, I do remember that, but it’s only very vague.
[6:28]
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Mm. Could you then talk about time spent with your father then as a young child.
Well yes, that’s much easier because he would – I mean, we – as I say, I was born in
Harpenden and when I was about five we moved up to Chester because of his job.
And we lived in a sort of – pretty well a bachelor – really myself and my brother lived
in a sort of bachelor household to many respects, even when my mother was alive.
Yeah, so I mean, he was a very nice man and he, you know, I think he was obviously
– of course I didn’t appreciate it at the time but sort of looking back, he was obviously
having a very ill wife to deal with as well as two sons to bring up, so – and a job to
do, so he was obviously under – must have been under an awful lot of sort of stress.
But he did an awful lot for us. He took myself and my – I was very keen on sport, so
he used to take me to – regularly to see football matches. We used to go and see
Liverpool, Everton, Manchester United principally, and that – so we used to go to
there. [Test matches too.] Of course he had a great keen interest in music and he took
me to concerts and, you know, musical things of all kinds. So I mean, it ranged from
going to sort of symphony concerts to going to see Duke – one of the very – a rare
live performance of Duke Ellington and his band in Liverpool. We went over to see –
I remember going to see that and seeing the Duke in person and things, which was –
which was wonderful. So he took, you know, I think there sort of – the love I have
now of music in particular is – probably derives largely from his influence. He played
the church in the organ – sorry, the organ, and he was also quite strongly associated
with Chester Cathedral. In fact I think he had thoughts that I might become a
musician or get musical, ‘cause he – when we were in Chester he – I went to the
Chester Cathedral Choir School. [Note: My first school was Abbygate Primary,
Chester; I went to the Cathedral school at age 8.] That was one of the sort of – it
wasn’t the first school but it was the early one, and so he sent me there, but I didn’t
really turn out to be very talented in the musical direction at all and so I never got into
the choir or anything there. But of course we went to the cathedral for – quite a bit
and I remember sort of church services, and again, liking – sort of liking sort of the –
of course the music there was pretty high quality, so – the sort of evensong and the
hymns and the – and the psalms and then – and so forth. So we had – he had quite an
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association with Bristol – sorry, Chester Cathedral and we’d go there quite a lot. [He
took me to symphony and choral concerts.]
[9:45]
Was that bound up with any religious faith, the cathedral going?
For him, yes, yes, for him, yes, that’s right. He was very much an Anglican to the end
of his life really and continued to play, you know, the organ in local churches in
Chester. So he was – he was really quite – yes, quite religious.
What do you remember of him at home?
I just remember that he – I mean, I guess I remember all sorts of things about him,
that he was obviously, you know, very keen to help us [my brother and I]. I mean, he
helped where he could in sort of things like homework. He, as I say, encouraged sport
– myself and my brother to do sport. We both [my father and I] had a great love of –
he had a great love of cricket and so I sort of gained that. Actually I was quite
reasonably – not great but reasonably good at cricket and so he sort of encouraged
that. He was – he also taught [me to cook] – because it was a bachelor household, of
course he did all the cooking, so we – he taught me how to cook. In particular he’d
served in the army in India so he had a great passion for curry and India from his time
in the Second World War and so he – that was one of his sort of more favourite meals
was cooking curry. You know, at a time before there were millions of Indian
restaurants everywhere, he was a sort of enthusiast and a very, you know, reasonably
good cook. So I sort of learnt that from him as well. So yes, and he was, as I say,
very – always very encouraging at school. Obviously he must have – again, I
probably didn’t appreciate it at the time, but of course he – I took the Eleven Plus and
I failed the Eleven Plus and I must have been a fairly difficult child from a sort of – at
least from a sort of physical point of view because before I was eleven I kept – I kept
having sort of accidents. I seemed to be very accident prone. So I had a very bad
burn. I got caught – when I was about seven I got – I was caught on fire by a bonfire
and all – and I was in hospital for six months and I almost lost my leg.
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Gosh. How did that happen?
We were – we had a garden and I was playing with a little girl next door [Name:
Emma Carson] who was the same age as me. We must have been about – I think I
was about seven at the time. And we’d made our own bonfire and my trousers I think
just caught on fire and then a neighbour leapt over and put it out, but my left leg was
very badly burnt and I had to have – I think about seven skin grafts all together for
about six months. I was in hospital [Alderhay hospital, Liverpool] for six months.
And then later I broke my – I can’t remember which limb, but I broke both my arms
and my leg but all at different times, before I was eleven. I think one was climbing
out of a tree, one was having some sort of a scrap at school and the other one was
playing football, so I was seen to be very accident prone and always [laughs] sort of in
plaster or in hospital. And that likely had an influence on my schooling because –
particularly the six months I was out of school and so forth, so obviously he looked
after me at that time. And then when I passed – sorry, failed the Eleven Plus, he then
sent me to a little sort of private school [Wellington School, since closed] in a place in
Bebington near Birkenhead, which was an interesting place. It was – and that’s where
I did all my secondary schooling up to the sixth form [I was in the lower Sixth at
Wellington until moving to Yorkshire]. And that was – and that school, I think, did –
it had its oddities but it had – there were certainly some influential teachers there and
that – I guess I was seen as a late developer and then I started to show some talent in
certain areas and that then sort of – but again he obviously had to sacrifice salary and
things to send me to a private school.
[14:28]
Did you get any sense of the reasons for the sort of interest that he’d shown in your
performance at school, what was behind sort of the encouragement or the support,
which seems to be quite significant really?
Yes, I think it’s the – I mean, he had a – he and – I mean, it’s probably worth just
going back because my mother had two other children before I did – before I came
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along and they both died at a very early age as very young infants. So one had, what
is it, hydrocephalitis and died when he was one and I think the other died – I can’t
remember the reason for it. But the other one died again within a few months of birth.
So I think they had a very traumatic family period and perhaps that had an influence
on my mother’s later illness, but sort of very tragic. And then they thought that they
weren’t going to have any children themselves so they adopted my older brother
[Marshall] and – who’s eight years older than I am. And so they adopted him in 1941
and then I came along – I’m not sure whether it was a surprise or not, but I came
along eight years later in 1949. So I guess, you know, as I say, with the – I’m sure he
felt that he had to sort of devote a lot of his sort of energy to both of us.
[16:18]
Before we get to this school with its oddities and influential teachers, could you just
say as a younger child what you tended to play with inside?
Oh, erm – ooh, that’s difficult to – let’s think about that. I mean, I was very active. I
mean, I loved sport, so I liked soccer, I liked cricket, running. We lived in a house
with a small orchard. You know, I liked doing things outside in general. And, you
know, I used to – my peers would tend to be people who liked doing things outside.
Erm, I suppose I read a fair bit but not, you know, I wouldn’t say anything more than
the average child of that, you know, that period, you know, the sort of Just William
books and all those things that were around. And I’m not – I don’t think I – that era,
as you say, pre eleven or twelve, pre being a teenager, a younger child, I wouldn’t
have – I don’t think I would have necessarily taken a huge interest in science or
anything like that. I read – as I say, I read a lot. But I think my sort of, you know, the
interest in sport and things was probably predominant. I mean, I quite – I quite liked
to take things apart, so I do remember taking a typewriter completely apart and then
not being able to put it back together again. So I did like sort of fiddling around with
things inside but on the whole I just liked to be, you know, as I say, sort of outdoor
and active really.
Did you have any toys?
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Er … yes. I think – I’m sure I had a train. My older brother was – I mean, I’m not
even sure whether it was mine or his. We did have a sort of train – Hornby 00 train
set, but he was much keener on that sort of thing than I was. And, you know, we had
Meccano sets and jigsaws and all these sort of things that you – but, you know, I’m
sure I played with them in all sorts of ways but on the whole I didn’t – I wouldn’t say
I, you know, there was nothing that really grabbed me. I liked listening to music. I
mean, I liked – perhaps this was a little bit later. I had an old gramophone record, you
know, player and started playing sort of – when they came out, the sort of vinyls and
singles and things like that.
So you had a preference then for being outside. Other than sport, what were you
doing when you were playing outside, whether it’s in the orchard or elsewhere?
I suppose they would be imagination games of various sorts, you know, sort of the
cowboys and Indians scenario or things. In fact, I think that’s how I got burnt
[laughs], we were doing that. So I suppose they were sort of, you know, sort of games
of imagination, I suppose.
Were there particular outside places that you went to a lot that were significant?
Not really because we had a – we had a nice garden in – we had a really nice house
with – a semi detached but quite big and it had a – we had our own – it was called the
Orchard and we had at the back an orchard and that was a good place to play. And it
was not in Chester but on the – it was in a place called Upton. And there was a golf
course there and there were some woods and things, so it was really quite easy to get
out into the sort of, you know, into woodland and countryside and things like that, and
places to play and friends to meet and so forth.
[20:02]
Thank you. Could you then tell me about the oddities of this school, Bebington –
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Oh yes, it was called Wellington School but it’s not the Wellington [laughs]. It was a
Wellington School. And it was – I mean, I – one has to say, they did me proud in
many ways, particularly individual teachers, but it was, I suppose, a – it was a – a
school that was – it doesn’t exist anymore. I think it was closed about fifteen years
ago. But it was a school developed in Bebington, which, as you probably know, is on
the fringes of Birkenhead. I suppose it really was servicing people like myself who
were having difficulties with, you know, couldn’t get into grammar schools because
of the Eleven [Plus] – there were quite a few people who hadn’t passed their Eleven
Plus or people who – and so it was – we had a bright green uniform, which sort of led
to a lot of sort of, you know, sort of – er, if you like, abuse from the local secondary
modern kids [laughs], who thought we were a sort of bit of a target. And we – it had
sort of pretentions for being a sort of public school. You know, rugger was the – it
preferred rugger to soccer, so we – which – I didn’t like rugby particularly and
preferred to do soccer but the school liked rugger. And they still had sort of corporal
punishment and things that teachers could do, which they couldn’t possibly do these
days. And it was a boys’ school, so it was single sex, and the – I used to take the train
from Chester to Bebington, which is about twenty-five minutes, with quite a few other
kids from the same school, and get off and go there. And it had this sort of – as I say,
this sort of slightly public school ethos. They had houses. They had a school song
and a Latin motto and, you know, you did – Latin was regarded as really important.
So I think they had – and the headmaster was this – who founded the school, was
called Mr Fogg. And so he was a very – yeah, I mean, he was – the school was his
life and it was – my recollection was that it was – I mean, you know – I’m sure this
isn’t, you know, this is just my perception looking back, but actually it was very
enjoyable. I mean, I made a lot of good friends there, some of whom I’m still – one
or two I’ve still got or keep in touch with. It was a bit of a sort of, you know, being in
the sort of fringes of Scouse land, it had some sort of real characters in the, you know,
as part of my schoolmates, who got up to all sorts of odd tricks.
Tell me about some of them and what they got up to.
Well, they would – I mean, I suppose the main thing was of course the – I’m sure this
is a tale that’s told in many schools. You know, if there was a teacher who showed
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any sort of sign of weakness then they would take advantage of that person [laughs] in
a sort of fairly merciless, you know, in hindsight a very merciless way. And they – so
the good teachers of course knew how to keep the class under control and – but, you
know, we – I mean, one of the things we – just to give an example. We had a French
teacher who – well, we actually had a succession of French teachers who were all
hopeless disciplinarians. And we had one poor teacher who came in who had no real
idea how to teach a, you know, sort of – we must have been thirteen or fourteen and
he had really no idea how to keep us under control – the school under – the class
under control. And of course people would mispronounce it, you know, monsore, si-
vu-plate, you know, purposely they would sort of mispronounce all these things to
sort of hoots from the class. And even persuaded the teacher to take us – oh yeah, and
this teacher had – I think for very unfair reasons, the class decided to call him – they
thought he looked like Count Dracula so they called him the Count, sort of typical
Scouser humour, you know, we were going to have, you know, French from the
Count. And so he got this idea, which of course was a disastrous idea, of taking – he
said, you know, he would take some of the class, or the class, to some sort of event
that – and then we’d write about it in French. So they persuaded him to take them to
one of the old Hammer Horror Dracula films [laughs] down in Hamilton Square in
Birkenhead. So the class went down there of course and watched this Dracula film
and then wrote about it. So he had absolutely no discipline, so the headmaster had to
occasionally, you know, come into the class because it was sort of essentially
completely out of control. And, you know, like a lot of, you know, as with boys,
some of the kids would sort of make strange sounds during the lessons to, you know,
sort of distract things as far as possible. So it was, you know, it was a sort of school
where – yeah, some, you know, as I say, they would take – they would be fairly
merciless.
[26:10]
You said that at this school you started to show sort of promise in various areas.
What were those?
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I think principally – the first thing that I think gave any hint that I had some – I used
to do – I started to do quite well in mathematics and we had an exceptionally good
teacher there, who did – unlike this other chap, had really very good discipline and
knew how to keep the class in control. And I started – we had the maths classes from
him and – Sidney Johns was his name, and he – and it became quite – quite quickly
after I – I went there when I was about – yes, I guess I was – yeah, I must have been
thirteen when I joined there, it was in the second year. So started to do, you know,
maths classes and things like that and basically I caught onto the maths very easily
and started to get things right and pretty soon I was sort of the top of the class in
maths. So he recognised that and his teaching was very – really excellent, and he got
me through to O level at the time. And of course the other kids, sort of going back to
this thing, of course, they were pretty keen to sort of plagiarise my [laughs] stuff if
they could. And I started to show quite a lot of promise in, you know, English and
history, I think largely due to the fact we had good teachers. So the – my recollection
is if we had a bad teacher, like French or Latin, I didn’t do very well and the other
kids didn’t do very well. If we had a good teacher who could keep discipline then we
started to do very, you know, generally people would do much better. And I then
started to find the niche. We had an okay chemistry teacher. We had a nice chemistry
lab. Again, things happened which – he wasn’t quite such a good – well, he wasn’t
perhaps observant because the, you know, I’m sure this would not be allowed these
days, but we had an enormous chemistry lab with old fashioned benches and reagents,
acids and bases and all – and indicators, lined along. So you were sitting there. So
you could grab a sort of bottle of hydrochloric acid or something like that just like
that, and then we would do experiments and things like that. But of course the – the
nature of the kids there would be that they’d, you know, when the teacher wasn’t
looking they’d sort of pour one [laughs] thing into another and then he wondered why
his experiments didn’t work very well [laughs]. But he was a good teacher, you
know. I think I got – I started to get interested in chemistry at that time. So, you
know, a little bit of the science started to come through.
What about the teaching of other sciences at the school?
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There was no – there was – my recollection – I don’t think we did any physics at all
that I can remember. I certainly didn’t do physics O level or anything. And – what
else would we have done? We did maths, chemistry. We did biology, that was
alright. I mean, I think at the time I found it a bit boring ‘cause it seemed to be
learning things off by heart in rote. We had a very good geography teacher [called
Brian Bristow].
Could you tell me about the content of geography as you remember it?
Yeah. Well, I think that was pretty good because that was sort of getting into – we
had a good geography teacher, a man called Mr Bristow, and he was – I wouldn’t say
he was inspiring but he could keep discipline but also he knew how to systematically
go through things and some of the things were just intrinsically – you do in geography
are just intrinsically interesting, like, you know, glaciers. That’s, I guess, the first
time you actually get to know something about, you know, volcanoes and landscape,
morphology. Those things start to come into the class, you know, sort of economic
things, you know, sort of steel production in Belgium in 1962, or something like that,
becomes part of the things you learn about, which are not necessarily wildly
interesting, but – all of it, but, you know, geography is a – there’s parts of geography
which I remember really enjoying.
Do you actually remember specifically him about volcanoes and –
Yes, I do, that’s right. In fact I remember doing an essay that was about, you know,
the sort of structure of volcanoes and doing quite a good job of it. I mean, I wouldn’t
say at that time – ‘cause I know other colleagues in my field said they wanted to be
volcanologists since they were five. That wasn’t the case, I mean, it was just – I
wouldn’t say that, you know, I was any more interested in volcanoes or glaciers or
bits of history, for that matter, or finding it satisfying to do maths, you know,
proficiency in maths. So those are all things that – so I enjoyed things generally. So
yeah, so that’s sort of an influence of school.
[31:28]
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But of course the other thing was that when I became a – the other thing my father did
for me, which again I’m sort of very indebted to him for, and my brother, is that he
sent both of us every summer, for me for about four years when I was a sort of, you
know, early mid teenager, and my brothers had the same, to a sort of place in Bangor
in Wales where they had something – have you ever come across the Crusaders?
Yes, a Christian …
It’s a Christian [organisation]– that’s right, it’s –
Youth group.
A youth group, that’s right. And the Crusaders – my brother was a member of the
Crusaders, again I guess under my father’s influence. I wasn’t but I got – they took –
they sent my brother to this sort of – it wasn’t really a camp because it was actually in
some sort of halls of residence place in Bangor. And I went there and you met kids
from all over the place. It was probably about ten days in the summer and the main
thing they did was essentially outdoor pursuits, sort of canoeing, mountain climbing,
coasts. So you got a little bit of – not real science but, you know, you would be going
along beaches. But the main thing, actually the highlight, was, you know, climbing
the Snowdonian Mountains. So the leaders of this group were, you know, good, you
know, knew what they were doing in the hills and the mountains and a little bit of
very basic rock climbing and things happened. And I went on that for about four
summers in a row and thoroughly enjoyed it and that really led me to, you know, I
suppose because I had already a natural propensity for being outdoors, that then led
me to a sort of real interest in sort of – in climbing and mountaineering and getting in
the outdoors. And later the – later, when I made friends at school both in Bebington
and later in Yorkshire, I, you know, did quite a lot of caving. I did – I was involved –
because Chester’s a Roman city, when I was probably around fifteen, this is still at
school, I got – I went – I was sort of taken to the Museum at Chester and I got
involved in a bit of a dig round there to do, you know, get Roman stuff out of the
ground. And I remember that was really interesting. And we started to go into –
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again with my friends, into North Wales and we started going down some old disused
Roman mines and started doing a bit of potholing, got interested in that, and picking
up minerals and fossils and getting interested in those. I think that was sort of – that
process sort of led me to this interest in, you know, in geology actually. So I – and
again, doing things probably which would be completely – [laughs] would get sort of
health and safety people going mad these days.
[34:59]
Could you describe some of the most memorable moments over the sorts of things that
you’ve just described, from the sort of Crusaders outings to these subsequent outdoor
activities with friends? You may well – the person listening to the recording may well
not know what potholing involves or even very basic –
Yeah, and I think – yes, I can sort of do that quite – I mean, Snowdonia of course has
some – a wonderful mountain range of peaks. There’s thirteen of them over 3,000
feet. And one of the sort of – at this Crusaders camp, one of the things was to climb
at least three or four of them during the course of the trip. And we went up a
mountain called Tryfan, which is one of the more interesting peaks in Snowdonia.
It’s quite precipitous so you don’t need ropes or anything but it’s quite an adventurous
walk. I mean, it’s a little bit more of a walk in places that you have to sort of
scramble and climb up. And we – I remember those very vividly, climbing that
mountain for the first time, I must have been about fourteen, I would say, something
like that, and thinking what a sort of wonderful thing it was and then getting to the top
and seeing the spectacular views over the mountains. So that was – that was pivotal.
And then I remember going with my mates – we decided to go into a place called
Hawarden in North Wales, near Flint, where there is quite a lot of – it’s limestone.
There’s sort of – there’s caves but there’s also old mines, lead mines, there, which go
into caves. And we went – we just went and we got – we bought ourselves carbide
lamps and stuff and went into these mines. I’m sure it was terribly dangerous. I
mean, nowadays they’d be probably fenced off and, you know, keep out, but then you
could just go into them. And at the time there would be lots of, you know, on the
moors round the mines you’d still have lots of – which you wouldn’t have these days,
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‘cause they’ve probably all been picked up, but at that time there would be big
nuggets of galena, lead ore, which you’d break open and there’d be this fantastic
silver colour and then there would be bits – because it was limestone you’d have bits
of fossil, crinoids and brachiopods and all these shelly things in the limestone so you
could see these fossils. And then you’d – and zinc, bits of zinc ore. And so, you
know, as a teenager I’d sort of get interested and look up books, you know, simple
mineral identification books or fossil identification books and say, what’s that, and
sort of look at it and be able to identify it. And same with, you know, even in, you
know, being in Chester, you could actually dig in your own garden and find old
things. And so I got that sense of being in the outdoors but also seeing lots of
interesting things around, which – and then the sort of adventure of going down an old
mineshaft with sort of carbide lamps and torches.
How small did it get as you were going –
Erm, not really. We – at that stage, I mean, when I – we were never trained. I mean,
we never went to an outdoor centre like you would these days and people taught you
how to do this properly. It was just a group of lads going into the countryside and
finding this hole and saying, well, let’s go and see what’s in there. So later on, when I
was in the sixth form in Yorkshire, I used to go – I got some friends and we did, you
know, some more, if you like, you know – what’s the word, more – not professional
but, you know, we did some potholing where we sort of knew more what we were
doing [laughs] than we did when I was a kid. But as I say, I remember that being
very, you know, very interesting, and I think that was actually what sparked my
interest in becoming a geologist.
What was the – for those who haven’t done it, what’s the appeal of going into holes
and –
I suppose curiosity and exploration really. I mean, what’s down there, what’s round
the corner. There’s these stalactites or flowstones and you’ve nice structures, maybe a
bit of water running down or a waterfall. You know, it’s the sort of capturing of this –
I suppose it’s a combination of, you know, the interest in the natural world and the
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curiosity of finding out what’s round the next corner, I suppose. I suppose it’s sort of
a – a bit of, you know, sort of adventure, and quite physical because obviously if
you’re climbing mountains or going down caves you sometimes have to do quite a lot
of physical effort.
And these things that you picked up, whether they were fossils or bits of ore, did you
take them away?
Yes, I sort of started a bit of a collection at home. It wasn’t a terribly well organised
one but I just sort of kept bits and pieces of fossil and mineral at home and sort of
started to find out what they were.
Can you remember where and how you collected them together at home, whereabouts
they were in the house?
I think they were just in my bedroom actually, probably in drawers. As I say, it
wasn’t – it wouldn’t look like the Natural History Museum [laughs] collections at all.
It was sort of fairly random, fairly random. I didn’t – don’t think I organised them
terribly well.
[40:41]
What was the nature and extent of your own religious faith, given that you were going
to Chester Cathedral and also going to Crusaders?
Yes. I mean, of course I was exposed through my father’s faith and things like
Crusaders to a lot of religion. I think probably when – sometime in the sort of – in the
mid teens, I think it was still while at Wellington, we had religious studies and myself
and one or two other people in the class – I mean, we sort of started to talk about
religious things and basically decided we didn’t believe a word of it [laughs]. So I
think my, you know, sort of – if you like, I’ve been an agnostic all my life and I think
that view came really quite early, you know, as I say, when we were getting this stuff
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at school and we basically didn’t believe much of what it – [laughs] what we were
being told.
Is there anything in particular about what you were told that you didn’t believe? Or
was it about, I don’t know, what faith implied about what people should do in terms of
their own conduct or was it the stories of religion?
I think it’s the stories and that they didn’t really ring true with what one sort of
intuitively understood about the world. And – I mean, I couldn’t say it was a sort of
passionate interest. I mean, I guess we were too busy doing all sorts of other things to
worry. But, you know, when we were exposed to religion it didn’t really – I mean, it
never – I don’t think it ever actually meant very much to me.
[42:28]
Now that you’re an older child, at this age, what sense did you have of your father’s
sort of political outlook or –
He was a, I would say, sort of a liberal – he probably voted Conservative most of his
life, which is – he possibly voted Liberal one year, which – with his second wife. He
remarried when I was sort of about – I guess I was about seventeen [eighteen] when
he remarried. But he was I think politically probably quite Conservative but not –
certainly not rightwing. He was – so I think he was, you know, he was – as I say, I
would describe him – his behaviour and views and attitudes were much more sort of
Christian than they were informed by any sort of deep political – I don’t – I’m not
sure he actually had deep political views or wasn’t as – I don’t think that meant as
much to him as, you know, his religion and Christianity.
What affect did the latter have on his behaviour, his religious faith?
I think that he was always a very considerate person. People – on his tombstone
actually my brother and I had – and the other members of my family thought – I’m
trying to remember the exact words, but sort of ‘here lies a gentleman’. And that’s
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what everybody said about him, that he was very gentlemanly, very considerate to
other people. You know, I think he sort of lived his religion in many ways and a sort
of kind person, very helpful and, you know, supporting other people rather than
himself. I think that’s, you know, I would describe him as a sort of very unselfish
person in many respects.
[44:21]
Thank you. What happened then at the end of the Wellington School in terms of
decisions about what to do next?
Yes. Well, I think – what happened then was – I did my O levels there and then I did
the first half of my sixth form there. And I did geography, chemistry and maths as A
levels. I decided to do geology O level on my own and so that’s what I did. I didn’t
have any schooling, I just read up geology and looked at the syllabus and I told the
school I wanted to do the exam at the end of the sixth form. And I took a geology O
level and passed that. So of course by that time geology was – had really become
quite a big interest and I’d sort of – and then I think I had – a very pivotal moment for
me was that I – still really grateful to the man happened, was – as I say, in the lower
sixth I thought that geology might be an interesting subject, so it was suggested I went
to Liverpool University where there was a very eminent professor called Wally
Pitcher. And Wally Pitcher is one of the – of course I didn’t know that at the time but
I now know is the one of the great British geologists. And he was the professor at
Liverpool and I went over to see him, just to, you know, just to have a conversation.
And we had maybe a half an hour talk with him, just sort of careers advice and, you
know, if I wanted to do geology what would he advise. And so he said, ‘Well, go to
Imperial College. That’s the best …’ He was an Imperial College alumni and he said,
‘Apply to Imperial College. That’s the place to do geology,’ which – at the time it
was undoubtedly one of the two or three best places in Britain. And so he – I got that
advice and that was fine. And then I thought, well, that’s what I’m going to do, I’ll go
and do geology at university. Again not – volcanoes weren’t really, you know, it
wasn’t that I sort of got passionate about volcanoes that time, I just liked the natural
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world and could see it was an interesting career with possibilities of travel and being
outdoors.
[46:50]
And I went then to – my father then moved from Chester and he got a job in Bradford
and so I then – and then by coincidence – his father lived – was the vicar of Baildon
[Yorkshire], which is a little village between Keighley and Ilkley and Bradford, and
we went to live in Baildon. And I then went to Bingley Grammar School. I did go to
a grammar school then, I went to do the second half of my sixth form and finished my
A levels there. So I went to Bingley Grammar School, which is Fred Hoyle’s old
school, and John Osborne’s old school I think as well. And that was a very good
school. I really enjoyed – it was only a year but I really enjoyed that. And that’s
where I made a lot of, you know, another lot of very good friends, some of whom I
still, you know, keep in touch with. And that – and then of course that was in the
Yorkshire Dales. As I say, when I went to the sixth form I immediately sort of linked
up with people who liked the same things as I did, and particularly caving, so we
started to do a lot of caving in the Yorkshire Dales at weekends and things like that.
And that was really great fun. And I – that’s when I sort of, as I say, applied to go to
Imperial.
[48:29]
What was your sense at this time of what geology consisted of? And a linked
question, what was the appeal for you of it as a subject?
Yes. Well, I think it’s – I think it was – I got the sense that it was about the history of
the earth, which I found very interesting, and how the earth worked. I wouldn’t say it
was uppermost in my mind was that you could get oil out of the ground or minerals
and things like that. So I did do it – I think I got interested in it really because of the
curiosity, the fact that I’d learned to sort of see minerals and fossils and thought these
were interesting. And so sort of some of the science questions, you know, about
geological processes started to occur to me in a very sort of primitive way and so I
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thought it would be an interesting degree. And of course I knew by that time that if
you did a degree in geology you got lots of fieldwork and you went to interesting
places on field trips and that would be fun. So that all looked quite attractive, you
know, as a subject to do. And then, as I say, Wally Pitcher had said Imperial was one
of the best places. By that time I think my prediction – I don’t think they predicted A
levels at that time. I mean, you just did them and you got a result. But the – and
when you went to – actually when you went to Imperial they interviewed you and
then they offered you three Es at that time, because they did it essentially on the
interview. They weren’t – they decided whether they liked the cut of your jib or not
and then offered you three Es, so – which of course is easy to – was a bit, you know,
wouldn’t really have been a difficulty of achieving that. So I got the maths, chemistry
and the geography A levels and then went there.
What was the – what were your impression of – is it Walter Pitcher?
Wally, yes.
Wally Pitcher. I know you only had a conversation with him for half an hour but how
did he strike you as an individual?
He was a very kind man. I mean, I knew him of course much later from –
professionally. So I, you know, he died a number of years ago now but, you know,
through my career I came across him. And of course – I’d be interested to look at the
dates actually ‘cause as a teenager, when I met him I think I thought of him as a sort o
fairly, you know, elderly guy. He was probably about forty or something like that
[laughs], I suspect, maybe fifty. But I just remember him being very helpful. And of
course he’s another person who’s very well known for being very sort of helpful to
students and other – younger scientists and things like that. He got that reputation in
his career for doing that. And so my recollection was just of a, you know, sort of
relatively – in my – from my perspective of being a teenager, a relatively sort of
mature guy who, you know, may be about my father’s age or something like that.
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What was your father’s view of this interest in geology and now this decision to read
geology?
Oh, he supported – I mean, he liked the idea of, you know, he thought I could do
whatever I wanted really. He didn’t put any sort of barriers or – in my way or, you
know, sort of – not really directed me at all. I mean, as I say, in the sense of, you
know, he didn’t have a view of what I should do. He – when I got this interest and
wanted to go to university – he’d not been to university, so – I think of course he was
in a generation which – people going – many people going to university didn’t exist.
So he was fine about that.
And what do you remember of the interview at Imperial?
Not very much, I’m afraid. I just remember going there [laughs] and that’s about it.
I’m afraid I’ve got very little memory of that.
[52:40]
And when did you go up to Imperial? What year was it when you –
Well, it was immediately the – it’s 1968 that I went, I went to Imperial, started it.
Could you describe – sort of take us on a tour of Imperial Department of Geology at
this time in 1969 when you arrived?
It was absolutely fantastic I think for – I mean, it was very, very exciting. I mean, you
were going to London in the, you know, sort of it was the same year as, you know, the
anti Vietnam demonstration, students in London were sort of rioting, you know, sort
of – there were rock concerts all over the place with, you know, what now are sort of
iconic names, and it was just very exciting to go there to London as a city. The
department itself was, you know, it’s in a gigantic – I don’t know if you know it. It’s
quite close to the Albert Hall, but it’s – near the Royal School of Music, but the Royal
School of Mines is this absolutely enormous, you know, mid Victorian building with
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huge lions at the gate and all very impressive. And, you know, when I got there it was
great. And they had some fantastic professors at the time and there were two or three
who were sort of extremely influential and superb teachers. So it was all very – at the
time it seemed all very exciting. And then of course you, you know, meet lots of
students from all, you know, you make new friends and so forth, and I thought, you
know, it was tremendous actually. It was very impressive. I mean obviously nothing
quite like that – experienced nothing quite like that before.
So sort of standing at the doorway to the Department of Geology at this time, do you
remember it well enough to sort of take us on a tour of what the department consisted
of?
Yes, very similar now actually, I mean, if you go in there, ‘cause it’s one of these
ancient buildings, like this one, that you really can’t do very much. I mean, this
building will look the same in – there’ll be detail differences inside. But it’s a giant
building with four big floors, huge Victorian stone stairs going up from floor to floor
and, you know, offices and labs with students and sort of coffee areas and cabinets
full of rocks and fossils and things, so really not dissimilar to the geology department
today, obviously of the time. But, you know, it was very impressive. And a nice big
lecture there for the sort of first year lectures.
[55:24]
And what was the content of the first year?
Well, we did – we did mostly geology, very traditional – now in retrospect very
traditional, but really good, you know, really good well taught geology, I would say
eighty percent geology. We did a couple of subsid courses [subsidiary subjects] and I
took chemistry and maths as subsids, ‘cause I’d enjoyed those. And that was fine. So
we – and we had, you know, sort of a classic menu of lectures and labs and things like
that.
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Could you tell me about sort of the individual lecturers, how they presented, what they
–
Oh yes, yeah. Yes, I mean, the people who were outstanding – there were three –
there were two big professors who were, as I say, very famous and even at that time
had already made their fortune and name, reputation. And then there was a lecturer,
who I’ll come back to because he was sort of perhaps the key person. But there was a
chap called John Ramsay, who was an FRS, still alive, lives in France, and he was a
structural geologist. And he was world famous for his – at the time he was probably
the world’s greatest structural geologist. And so to translate that into sort of, you
know, for somebody who isn’t a geologist, basically he was interested in how you
formed the Alps or the Himalayas and how you collide continents together and you
build mountains up and what are the mechanisms of doing that. And he was a
brilliant lecturer. He was very pivotal for me, for my career, because he was the first
person who showed me very directly how you could use mathematics and understand
the way the world works. And so a lot of his work was really cutting edge stuff. And
he would use a lot of mathematics. And in the very first lecture he ever gave us at
Imperial, he was there to show us wonderful pictures of the Greenland Mountains and
the Alps and saying about the basic geology, but then he would show – the lecture
was really to show us how you could use mathematics to understand this.
And how could you, for people outside?
Well, you know, for example, if I’m squashing together two continents and I’ve got,
say, a fossil in the mountain somewhere, and that fossil’s got a certain shape, let’s say
it’s – we’ll say for argument it’s like an echinoid, it’s a sphere, okay, so it’s a sphere.
Now if it’s part of a mountain being crushed together, that sphere gets deformed into a
flat plate, just like you’d take some putty, a ball of putty, and if you squashed it, it
would deform and it would change its shape. Now that’s called strain and if – to
describe that strain you need some mathematics and you need to understand the –
describe the geometry of that object in some way and you then usually use – you can
use matrices. I mean, matrices is a quick way of sort of understanding the strain or,
for example, the stresses which cause that strain, sort of stress tensors and so forth.
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And so you can use sort of calculus and matrices to understand that deformation and
you want to know how much that squashing of that little fossil is telling you also
about the – how much the mountains on a large scale have deformed together. So you
can link this sort of small scale feature with a very large scale phenomena, you know,
how you form a mountain. Now it’s a bit more tricky than that because most fossils
or objects that you can see are not nice spheres but they might be, you know, like a
cockroach or something like that, a fossilised cockroach, and so when they’re
deformed the length of the cockroach might get lengthened and – or it might get
twisted, and so you have to know about the angles. If you know what the original
fossil looked like and you now see how it’s distorted, you can then work out how
much that fossil’s been squashed. And so that was the sort of thing he was talking
about. So it was really showing – and then if you go to faults, you know, in big
mountain belts, you get these gigantic faults where one bit of Africa pushes over on a
bit of Europe along a great big crack. And in order to understand that you have to
know about mechanics, you have to know about elastic theory, so you start to link
basic mathematics and physics with what you’re seeing in the field, you know, as a
geologist, what you see when you go up to the rocks. So that was very exciting and
he explained that very early on. And he was a wonderful lecturer in all sorts of ways
and hugely influential on me in terms of, you know, I suppose, you know, I could now
see that I could – the sort of mathematics that I seemed to be quite good at, I could
now see how I could, you know, use it to – link it up – I mean, I’d never – probably at
school, I’d never thought that maths had anything to do with rocks and fossils in any
way at all, so this was a sort of bit of a revelation by him. And so I – he was one of
the – as I say, a hugely influential teacher.
Could you – for the non mathematical listener, could you – that was a brilliant
description of how you can use sort of the changing shape of a fossil and you can try
and describe that change in shape mathematically to try and infer something about
the forces more widely than –
Yes, that’s right.
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But what is the role of matrices in that? What are matrices? How do they work
mathematically to allow you to describe the stress on something and the effect on its
change of shape?
Yes. Well I mean, it’s just a – of course it’s just a mechanism to define the – say, for
example, the stress, you know, the stress in three dimensions, for example, or to find
the relationship between stress and strain. So it’s really just a – I mean, in a sense it’s
a mathematical method, isn’t it, to – that you’re – that’s the – if you like, the easy
mathematical method to apply to a problem like that, or in elasticity. So I suppose –
and I think another bit of a lesson that I learnt, that, you know, mathematics is there –
I mean, I suppose I enjoyed solving mathematical problems and I know some
mathematicians liked the sort of beauty of mathematics. I’m not sure I was that way
inclined. I just saw it as a sort of – a tool for understanding what I was seeing as a
geologist, I think.
Had there been – I know that you said that you’d kept – you’d understood geology
and mathematics as separate before this at school and so on.
Yeah.
But had you – had maths been applied in any way before this? In the maths that
you’d done before, had you used maths in a kind of applied way?
I can’t remember doing that at all at school. I mean, we might have done the odd
billiard ball bumping into another billiard ball problem, you know, in mechanics.
We’d probably have done some things about velocities and tangents and Newton’s
law and things like, you know, sort of things like that. But my recollection of doing
mathematics at school was that it was taught partly in terms of procedures, partly in
terms of proofs. I remember doing, you know, proofs as sort of an – it was almost
like an abstract intellectual exercise, you know, rearranging equations, you know,
obviously geometry but again fairly abstract. I can’t remember the maths I was taught
at school being terribly linked to the practical world. It was a, you know, I enjoyed it
because I was quite good at it and so I could do it and that was, you know, that was
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sort of interesting. And then sometimes you’d solve a, you know, be given a maths
question and you’d solve it and would get it right and that was sort of – there was a
satisfaction about that. But I don’t remember a, you know, before I went to
university, really sort of seeing how it actually linked up with, you know, the real
world [laughs].
[1:04:29]
Thank you. So John Ramsay, you said was one of these key people at Imperial.
Yes.
Who would you –
John Sutton was – he was the Head of Department. And John Sutton and his wife
Janet, Janet Watson, first female President of the Geological Society, she was – they
were the two big figures of the time in Precambrian geology. And so he was a very
good lecturer and so was Janet. And they taught us about the geology of Scotland, the
Scottish Highlands in particular, where they’d made their names, and took us on, you
know, we had field trips up there and they – they were very good at the sort of broad
brush – broad brush, if you like – the big picture geology. And he would teach sort of
very general stuff in his first – in his first year lectures he would sort of – well, I
suppose this is still done, that it tends to be the big professor, the famous professor
teaches the first year students and gets them enthusiastic. And he was very – really a
very good lecturer. And at the time we were sort of enthralled. He was sort of, you
know, he was – he was sort of put up on a sort of pedestal of being sort of one of the
great outstanding geologists of Britain and so we wouldn’t have sort of seen John
Sutton and Janet Watson perhaps in any different guise than to John Ramsay. I mean,
again in retrospect, you’d have to say John Ramsay was the real giant, you know,
intellectual giant of the time, but at the time, you know, John Ramsay was a superb
lecturer. There’s an interesting science tale but I’ll probably leave that for a little bit.
I mean, what actually I now know of course is he was telling us stuff which was really
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behind the times [laughs], but at the time we thought this was fantastic, you know, it
was really sort of inspirational stuff.
[1:06:42]
Yes, I was going to ask – this is 1968 and I wondered to what extent at this time plate
tectonics was influencing what you were –
Well, it’s very interesting, we hardly got taught – in Imperial from ’68 to ’71 we
hardly got taught any plate tectonics at all. So at the same time the revolution was
going on in Cambridge and, you know, in France and Scripps and the plate tectonics
revolution was happening – I think we were told a little bit about – we were certainly
told about Holmes and Hess and the seafloor spreading hypothesis, but it was very
much in the sort of – the old Harry Hess, who was the great Princeton [professor], you
know, sort of lead, you know, sort of, if you like, the John the Baptist of plate
tectonics in a way. So we were taught something about seafloor spreading, but I think
in the third year we were still being taught what I think was broadly an out of date
picture of the earth, where plate tectonics didn’t figure an awful lot. And I remember
we actually – in the third year at Imperial College we actually went to – I remember
going to the library to read up about plate tectonics. It wasn’t part of – [laughs] you
know, the bits we were reading weren’t – it was about subduction, it wasn’t actually
part of the course. So my recollection of it was that we were being taught very high
quality material. At the time as a student you didn’t know any better. As I say, in
retrospect you’d have to say that it was, you know, that Imperial College missed out
on the plate tectonic revolution that happened in other places.
When you were talking about John Ramsay’s first year lectures, you were talking
about plates squashing together, was that –
Well, mountains squashing together.
Ah okay. So he wouldn’t have been talking in terms of plate collisions and –
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Not really, no, because, you know, sort of 1968, it wasn’t really part of the
vocabulary. You were talking about mio-geosynclines – I mean, this is getting
technical, but you were talking about sort of basins that – there was quite a lot of
thinking about vertical tectonics. I mean, we were taught about Wagener’s ideas and
continental drift, but the whole, you know, the – and polar wandering and all these
things, which suggest, you know, continental drift. So we were being taught about
aspects of collisional tectonics but it wasn’t called – it wasn’t in that language and it
wasn’t in the language that the plate tectonic revolution created. So I mean, if you
looked at some of the things that were going on, yes, there were continents colliding
together and bashing into each other and so forth and there was quite a lot of up and
down things going on as well, but the whole framework of thinking which plate
tectonics created for earth sciences wasn’t really in place at that time, or it was only
just emerging. So the revolution was happening but it wasn’t permeating [laughs] – it
hadn’t sort of permeated extensively, I don’t think.
And so when you were in the third year going off to read up on it yourself, what were
you looking at?
I just remember reading the – there’s a classic paper, one of the very early papers, by
Isacks, Oliver and Sykes, and that’s in the Journal of Geophysical Research, which
was one of the very first really good descriptions of subducting plates. And I
remember reading that and thinking, you know, how that explained volcanic arcs and
big earthquakes round – in Japan and things like that. And I remember that – being
very influenced by reading that. And so we were sort of semi self taught because, as I
say, the – we were being described stuff but it was sort of six – it was pre tectonics
concepts, I think, of how the earth worked.
[1:10:48]
Thank you. So John Ramsay, John – was there any – you mentioned that Janet
Watson was the first female –
President, yes.
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Was there any comment on the fact that she was a female lecturer or any kind of self
consciousness about that in her own –
Not that I could remember. We weren’t taught a lot by Janet actually at the time, it
was mostly John Ramsay, and we were – we weren’t really exposed to her much. We
had a few lectures. But I think she’d – again, I don’t know, you know, I don’t think I
really have any knowledge of exactly what, you know, what her employment contract
was. I suspect she did a lot more research than she did teaching, so she wasn’t sort of
held up as, you know, sort of the – at the time she wasn’t sort of held up as, you
know, sort of the role model for young female geologists, ‘cause actually there were
only two in our year and one of those dropped out, so we had one female and about
twenty-nine boys in the geology class. So it was a, you know, so still very extremely
male oriented.
How did that one female undergraduate sort of cope or –
I don’t really remember. I mean, she struck up a very close friendship with one of the
other students, they went out together, and I don’t think we really – I don’t think it
ever really was a sort of issue. I mean, I guess because there’s only one – I mean, at
the time it of course didn’t occur to us that was a bit odd [laughs], but that was –
Imperial College generally was very male dominated and there were very few female
teachers. I mean, Janet – I’m struggling to remember whether there was any other
woman at Imperial at the time who taught. Oh … what was …? Yes, er … There was
another one, a lady, and I’m just trying to remember – I didn’t get taught by – oh, it’ll
come back later. Yes, there was one other [Gloria Borley]. But it was, as I say, a
very male dominated situation. And it was the Royal School of Mines, so the other
big ethos at Imperial College was this sort of tremendous idea that Imperial College
and the Royal School of Mines had sort of populated the world’s mining companies
with geologists, so quite a few of our year did mining geology as a specialism. And
so there was a very – at the time there was a very strong link with the mining industry
and with the oil industry too, but very – particularly the mining industry. It was the
Royal School of Mines so it was the – essentially it was still under sort of the post
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empire, you know, it still viewed itself as the place that was supplying the world’s
geologists – the geologists for the empire, sort of thing. And there was still the sort of
– not, you know, not overtly said, but there was a sort of sense of that, that it was still,
you know, the big, you know, that if you came from RSM and you, you know, they
were – people are now – chief executives or senior managers in big mining companies
at the time were Imperial alumni and there was a big network of, you know, of people
who – so mining geology was a big issue, a big aspect.
[1:14:23]
Thank you. And other significant lecturers?
Well, I was going to say, the one who was the most significant by a long way was a
chap called George Walker, a lecturer at the time, and George was a really quite
brilliant scientist and a superb teacher. And he taught us mineralogy but most
significantly he taught us – he was at that time just starting to – he’d worked on
volcanic rocks, on the minerals in volcanic rocks, but he was just starting to turn
himself into a volcanologist and getting interested in volcanic rocks and processes in
young volcanoes. And so he taught us about minerals and he taught us about
volcanoes. And he was a quite brilliant teacher and that’s really the time – George is
the time when volcanoes I think sort of, if you like, came into my life, that I sort of
started to think this was quite interesting.
Are you able to say why, what about the way that he talked about them?
Well, I think it – it’s – I’m – what was pivotal was that in the first year I made three
new friends there [Clive Newhall, Ian Boughton and Geoff Wadge], three of the other
geology undergraduates, and we – the four of us decided that we wanted to go to
Iceland and look at volcanoes. And we decided – these are first year students. And
we hatched a plan to have an expedition to Iceland and we went to the Royal Imperial
College Expedition Society and the Royal Geographical Society and we put in for
some money for a student expedition, and George – it was George who said, well, you
know, we went to – we knew he was interested and did a lot of work in Iceland so we
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went to ask him. He said, ‘Well yeah, that’s a really good place to go and I can advise
you …’ so he said, ‘Well …’ He showed us maps and he said, ‘Well, this is a really
interesting area in the south west of Iceland, why don’t you do your expedition there?’
And he suggested some things we might do. And so we planned the expedition. We
went and raised funds. We got some money from the Royal Imperial College
Expedition Society, we got a bit of money from the Royal Geographical Society. We
went round to various manufacturers and got bits and pieces of stuff that we could
take with us. We got Vango, the tent people, to give us a tent, a couple of tents. And
we planned the expedition and we went there and we spent six weeks of the summer
of ’68 – sorry, ’69, I should say, it was ’69, in Iceland. And we went to this area
[Oraefaj�kull in southwest Iceland] where there was a big glacier and there were
some interesting volcanic rocks and we mapped the volcanic rocks. And we also went
– had a bit of a trip as part – we were there six weeks. We went to this place for four
weeks and we spent the other two weeks going round looking at the volcanoes of
Iceland. So I think that was probably the pivotal moment. I mean, that’s when I
thought this is a really interesting area.
Could you describe – take yourself back to that time and describe the landscape that
you saw when you were on this tour, looking at the volcanoes of Iceland?
Yeah. Well, of course Iceland’s like the moon. I mean, it’s a, you know, for a – as I
say, it’s so totally different from anywhere in Britain. I mean, it’s a wild rugged
landscape, very little vegetation. There are glaciers and then the rocks are black and
red and it’s all bare rock and gravel and big rivers and waterfalls. So it’s a sort of
spectacular – it’s a lunar like landscape, or that’s the way, you know, at the time we
sort of felt about it. And then the place we were in was pretty remote and so we had
very little – we were camping up near the glacier and it was, you know, there was
fulmars and skuas around and, you know, just spectacular scenery. And quite – at the
time quite difficult to get to so we had to sort of hike in. And so – and then there were
hot – in other places there were hot springs and rocks coloured by hot water, you
know, a reaction with hot acid waters and things so they’d all gone yellow and orange
colours. So very spectacular landscape. And, you know, for somebody like me and
my three friends, we were sort of, you know sort of – absolutely thought it was a
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wonderful place. It rained all the time but then that was, you know, almost part of the
fun.
Why?
Well, you know, you’re in sort of an expedition to – you feel you’re in some sort of
remote place and you’re battling against the weather and you’ve got the rain beating
on your tent and trying to cook food in a, you know, sort of horizontal rain sort of
thing is – I mean, it can be a bit miserable but on the other hand it’s a sort of, you
know, it’s – if you like, the outdoors, that’s part of the deal really. So it was very – it
was – that was a fantastic expedition.
[1:19:47]
Tell me more then about George Walker’s sort of teaching and influence on you.
Well, George, he eventually became my PhD supervisor of course. That’s the reason.
He had a group of research students who were doing volcanology. But that’s, you
know, later on. At the time he was a very careful teacher. He did beautiful diagrams,
you know, sort of hand drawn diagrams of minerals in 3D that he would show us and
he was very good at explaining some quite difficult concepts about minerals, ‘cause
you – I mean, you have all sorts of things about symmetry. Again, getting a bit
conceptually mathematical because you’re dealing with things like symmetry and
reflections and rotations, which explain why the minerals have particular shapes. And
he was really very good at that explanation. And then when we started to look at
rocks, which are aggregates of different minerals, and we’re starting to use what’s
called optical microscopy, where we look at very thin slices of the rock. And if you
were a geology student in the ‘60s you would do an awful lot of this. You would get
these, you know, sort of little – I mean, we still do it but they don’t do it as much as
they used to. But you’d get these little thin slices of rock, which I’m showing you,
which are – make – you slice the rock and you make it transparent and it’s now about
– this is about thirty microns of rock, so it becomes transparent to light. And then you
put it down a microscope and you can essentially – from the optical properties you
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can tell what minerals there are. And so a geologist in the late ‘60s would have done
an awful lot of that in their practicals. And he was very good again at explaining
things like the refraction of light and why we were getting these strange interference
colours. So, you know, that would go into the way light interacts and refracts and
breaks up into different colour bands and so forth. And we – and he was just really
good. Now at the time we really enjoyed it. And I know in hindsight that this is one
of the more – a lot of students find this really boring. I mean, it’s one of these
subjects that you do at university that people find, a, difficult and, they don’t find it
terribly interesting. And so it’s actually quite a skill for a lecturer to really bring this
aspect of mineralogy to life and he was really superb at doing that. So he was, you
know, people really regard him as one of the – probably the – along with Ramsay,
probably the best teacher of the – in the school.
[1:22:38]
What was he like as a character, as a person?
Oh, completely eccentric. But I mean, you know, we’d – as I say, his eccentricity and
getting to know him later in life when I was a PhD student and professionally, you
know, at that time of course he just came across as sort of a very scholarly man, quite
quiet in a way, but just gave his lecture with the sort of upmost clarity and every –
really all the students thought he and Ramsay were the two best teachers at the time.
In what way eccentric, as viewed by an undergraduate at this time?
Well, I don’t think we necessarily thought he was eccentric. I mean, again, I think
you – at the time you would see – I think you’d probably regard, you know, because
it’s all so new, you’d probably regard quite a few of the lecturers as eccentric [laughs]
in one way or another. He was very – he was quite quiet and, you know, you don’t –
as an undergraduate you don’t really get – I mean, possibly except for Cambridge and
Oxford where you’ve got the very strong tutorial system, you don’t really get to know
the staff that well, you know, personally. You probably do on field trips. Probably
field trips are the place you get to know the staff a bit more. But, you know, I don’t
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think you would have – at the time I would have thought of him as necessarily
eccentric.
[I should acknowledge Dr Malcolm Foost who was my personal tutor. In my second
year I had a crisis of confidence and nearly dropped out but Malcolm helped me to
overcome these doubts in my ability.]
[1:24:08]
Could you then tell me about what was – the field work aspect of the Imperial College
degree, what did it consist of, perhaps a field course in the first year and then –
Yeah, that’s right. That would be- typically you would do a field course in – I think –
did we go to Arran? That’s probably Arran. Oh no, sorry, we went to the – oh, that’s
right, we went to Skye, the Isle of Skye, for the field trip. And I remember that was a
wonderful trip, because basically you’ve got a group of sort of twenty-five, thirty
mostly young men sort of who were going to, you know, liked the outdoors, liked
geology but they also liked, you know, the good times in the bar and sort of, you
know, in retrospect the lecturers have to sort of keep an eye on things getting out of
control. But I remember that – the field trip to Skye was tremendous. That was our
first year. Then we went to Spain for three weeks and I remember that being a great
trip, going round Southern Spain, looking at the Betic Alpes and the rocks on the
coast near Malaga and Rio Tinto, the big mine in Southern Spain, and that was – I
remember that being really enjoyable.
What was – what did the work consist of on these field trips?
Oh well, you’d get trained to – and this is still the case. I mean, the nature of these
trips really hasn’t changed much over the years. I mean, the basic skill of a geologist
is to do [make] geological maps and you’ve got some electronic gadgets which help
you these days. But the basic idea is to depict on a map, you know, where the
different rocks are and interpret their relationships, you know, one’s younger than
another, one’s being deformed into a geological fold or there’s a fault. And you have
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to show where these are on the map. And then you have to have this sort of 3D to – I
mean, that’s one of the big skills in geology is this 3D – you can look at a geological
map, which is a 2D pattern, and you can – you learn – you’re taught and learn to think
of it in sort of three dimensions. You can see it as a three dimensional object in a
way, although it’s just a 2D map. Same way as you look at a contour map, if you’re
used to topographic maps you can see the mountains and valleys and so forth. And so
we did a lot of geological mapping. We did some what you might call look and see
interesting bits of geology, just go up to an outcrop and see some rocks and one’s blue
and the other one’s red and there’s something in – there’s a contact and you – with the
teachers you discuss what this might be. And you’re taught, you know, to look at
different sorts of geological relationships and, you know, tell a lava flow from a
limestone from a granite or whatever, so very basic geological skills. You’re taught
how to – a lot of geology is about again three dimensional structures, so you’re taught
how to record the geometry. Again, bringing mathematics in, you’re taught how to
record the geometry, which might be a plain, the orientation of a plain in space or a
line in space, and then you’re – if you’ve got a lot of measurements of different lines
and geological contacts and structures and lines, you’re then taught how to reproduce
those on something called a stereogram, which is a way of plotting geometric data on
a single graph. And then you learn to interpret that in terms of how the rocks are put
together on the larger scale. And then if you have observations from several places
you can sort of then reconstruct a larger scale picture of the sort of structure. So these
are all the sort of basic skills that you learn as a young geologist and it’s still the case.
I mean, it’s not that different nowadays.
How do stereograms work? What are they?
Yeah. Well, it’s a – it’s basically projecting onto a circle. You have a sphere and you
have a plain cutting that sphere and the way it cuts that sphere creates a line. And
then there’s a normal to that plain, which you can plot on the sort of, you know, on
this circular graph paper. You plot it on the circle. So if the plain’s vertical, the
normal to it will plot on the edge. If the plain is horizontal, the normal to it will plot
in the centre. And so you can instantly see, depending – just a single dot on this type
of graph paper will tell you whether it’s a horizontal plain or a vertical plain or
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something that’s got an angle of fifty degrees or whatever it is. And again they still
do that. I mean, as I say, nowadays you’ll probably have computers and things. You
know, there are lots of electronic aids that students can use these days which, you
know, mean it’s a bit – the education’s a bit different, but there’s still the – it’s still
the same fundamental thing of understanding structures in three dimensions really.
Did you take any instruments into the field?
Yeah, but very simple ones like compasses and what we call a clinometer, which is
something you measure the angle of a slope or a – the orientation of a line. You
would take a hand lens, obviously a hammer to bash the rocks. You’d need to see
what’s inside the rock. You’d take a hand lens, which is really a small magnifying
glass, so that you could – if the minerals are too small to distinguish by eye you’ve
got some hope of seeing the different minerals with the magnifying glass. So that
would be – you might take a tape measure. But very simple things, nothing fancy.
[1:30:19]
And to what extent did you begin to specialise throughout your undergraduate course
or to focus on particular kinds of geology, or perhaps to exclude certain kinds of
geology?
Well, I think that was interesting for me that I did the – I did the course – after this
Iceland trip, that’s when I really sort of saw, you know, volcanology as something I’d
really get interested in. And I was also interested in a field called igneous petrology,
which, again for the uninitiated, is really the study of rocks and their mineral
constituents and understanding both the chemistry and the physical arrangement of
minerals which then give you clues as to processes which created that rock. And
that’s the field called petrology and it’s actually the art of looking at a rock under a
microscope when it’s got this very thin slice and that – that had fascinated me as well.
And I thought, well, I wanted to do – in my third year I wanted to do – oh, that’s right,
I’ll take a step back. I got interested in this area and with another three students we
went to Portugal, just north of Lisbon, to do – another thing all geologists will do is
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what’s called an independent mapping project. You go somewhere and you create
your own geological map and you usually do that in about – six weeks would be
typical. And it’s almost – again, this still happens. That was between the second and
the third year. So the summer between the second and the third year we went to
Portugal and we – and I did my independent mapping. So it’s a bit of my own work,
doing my own geology, and then you come back and you get some of the rocks
you’ve taken and you slice them up and you look at them and find out what the
minerals are and so forth. And that was – I was also influenced by that. That was an
interesting trip, a different sort of geology. And so I wanted to do igneous petrology
as my third year option. You could specialise. And then they did mining geology,
they did structural geology, which is the area Ramsay specialised in, and they did
fossils, sediment course. So there was a number of things you could specialise in and
igneous petrology was one of them. But I was the only student who wanted to do this
so they didn’t put the course on, so I had to do the structural geology, the sort of
second choice. So I didn’t do much on volcanoes at all in the third year, I was just
doing this sort of structure course, or that was my main speciality.
[1:33:15]
And then could you tell us about the transition from undergraduate degree to PhD,
how that happened?
Yes, that was very straightforward. George Walker was building up a sort of – a
research group and I didn’t know this at the time but he was shifting his – he’d – for
the previous two or three years he’d been shifting his research direction to
volcanology and young volcanoes from his earlier fieldwork, which was dealing with
the geology of Iceland and minerals. And so he was starting to build up a sort of
school of research students and researchers and so myself and another colleague,
Geoff Wadge, who’s now professor at Reading, we both – both of us who’d been on
the Iceland expedition together, we both sort of signed up to be his PhD students. So
he took us both on in sort of 1971.
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Before we look at the content of your PhD, could you just tell us where you were
living at the time that you were an undergraduate?
Ah, right, yeah, that’s – that comes back to a bit of family aspect. When I first went
to university my father had been transferred from Bradford to Stockport and where
he’d been promoted to the sort of – the chief valuer of the Stockport office, so they
were dealing with bits of Derbyshire and that part of Derbyshire. And so he – about
this time he had remarried, or in – had he remarried? No, he hadn’t remarried exactly
then. He’d certainly met Trixie [Beatrice Greenwood], who was my stepmother to be,
and she lived in Birkenhead, so he actually lived in Birkenhead and commuted to
Stockport for his work. So my father at the time [that I first went to university] was
living in Birkenhead. And that was – yeah, I mean, that was a pretty interesting
aspect of family life, to then inherit a whole new family of really rather sort of
flamboyant characters. And so he’d started a sort of new family life in a way. And
then when he married Trixie they moved over – around 1970, so while I was at
university, they moved – I think that would have been my second year, they moved to
a place in Derbyshire called Whaley Bridge, which is just on the Derbyshire side of
Stockport, so that they – he then – he married and moved into a new house. So that
was my – at that time that was my place I’d go home to.
But where did you live while actually – in term time?
Oh, firstly had digs, which I didn’t like at all, in Streatham Common, which was
terrible, so within – during the first year – first term, I didn’t like it and we – I got
together with some of the friends and we moved into South Kensington, into a flat, a
sort of student flat. We had that for the year and then the following year we moved
into a flat in Gloucester Road, where I stayed I think for both the second and third
year.
And what did you do when you weren’t doing geology at this time?
Erm, we were, well, doing all the sort of things that you’d expect [laughs] students of
the ’60s to have done, I think, basically. We were, you know, going to rock concerts
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and gigs and playing sport, you know, I still continued to like sport, played soccer.
And, you know, sort of the usual things students do. And, you know, we – it was a
sort of, you know, we lived in a sort of slightly anarchic flat and that was, you know,
my recollection is great and some of the people I lived with are still again good
friends. And I guess we had a pretty good time actually [laughs], that’s my
recollection of it.
Were you lived with geologists or …?
There were – the flat had seven – we had a flat with seven people in it, three of whom
were geologists, including myself, and the others were doing all sorts of other things, I
think estate management, civil engineering, what was it? There was one doing
economics, I think. Not necessarily at – there was one guy who was basically just sort
of camping out. He was not doing a degree at all, he was just sort of, you know, he
wanted to be in London. Another was doing teacher training. Yeah, so it was a bit of
a diversity of people.
How was geology viewed as a subject by undergraduates studying other …?
I don’t think I really thought much about that. I think the, you know, they could see
that people like myself and my two friends in the flat who were doing geology were,
you know, pretty interested in it but, you know, no more than, you know, another – a
civil engineer would be interested in what they were doing or a, you know, and people
were interested in what they were doing. But I mean, I don’t think that really played a
big part of the sort of social …
You mentioned that this was London at a particular time, the student demonstrations
and things.
Yeah.
What did you see of that kind of thing happening?
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Well, I remember that there were lots of student, you know, we – there was certainly
a, you know, sort of student grants demo and there was the – and I remember seeing,
you know, the big – was it – where’s the US embassy, the one in – they were in the
Vietnam times. I remember sort of seeing people walking through the, you know,
walking through the streets then for that. So it was a, you know, it was that sort of era
of – the late ‘60s. So, you know, you’d go – and again, fantastic memories really. I
mean, I went to – I remember going to the very first rock – proper rock concert that
I’d ever been to, which was Jethro Tull and a group called Spooky Tooth and another
sort of obscure underground band called the Eclectic and Joe Cocker. And there was
a sort of – this was at the Albert Hall. That was sort of the first proper big rock
concert I’d been to. And then later we went to see the Cream’s last concert, you
know, the famous one that’s on the – do you know that one?
I don’t. I know who Cream are but, no, I don’t know –
No, they had a famous last – Cream’s last concert, which was at the Albert Hall,
which is a, you know, there’s a documentary film on it. It’s a bit like Live at Leeds
with the Who. It was a fairly sort of iconic concert. I remember going to see that.
And then there were Hyde Park concerts, where, you know, some of the sort of first
super bands like Blind Faith were playing. So there – I went to see the first
performance of Dark Side of the Moon [Pink Floyd] in Hammersmith. So that was a
fantastic time to be, you know, a student. I mean, the – I mean, it was, you know, it
was that sort of period, I suppose.
Good music.
Good music, yeah, that’s right. And I suppose that’s one thing I think my father never
really understood, because he’d taught me to love classical music, which I still do, but
of course he really couldn’t understand all this sort of [laughs] rock stuff that was
emerging, you know, and, you know, found it very difficult to understand the music at
all. So that was a sort of generational thing. So yeah, so it was a very lively time to
be a student in London. I’m not sure how good that did our studies, but … [laughs]
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[1:41:59]
And the content of your PhD, what was the PhD on?
PhD was on a volcano – an old extinct volcano in the middle of Italy called Bolsena,
B-O-L-S-E-N-A. And it’s about 100 kilometres or so north of Rome. It’s a big –
what we call a caldera volcano. It’s very – it was a very violent volcano and the
eruptions were very large and when the eruptions happened there was so much
material came out of the earth that the ground collapsed and formed a huge circular
lake we call the caldera. And it’s a very beautiful place. And my task that George
gave me was basically to map these – the volcanic deposits around this lake and try to
make sense of them but in a very – actually in a very innovative way. I mean, that’s
not my innovation, it’s George’s thought that there was a very different way of
looking at these rocks than anybody else had done before and so he suggested to me
and my other student colleague to work in – called Steve Self to work in – we worked
in the Azores. So he [George] had these sort of ideas that he wanted to promulgate
through, you know, the detailed research of students and that’s what I started to do.
And so I sort of went there and camped around the lake and started doing this
mapping project and looking at the – what we call stratigraphy, which is sort of
basically – you have a number of eruptions, each of which produces a layer, and you
want to trace these layers round and find out what – where they went and what their
characteristics are, and then try and interpret those observations in terms of the
eruption.
[1:43:55]
What was the innovative way that he was looking at this – the results in this manner?
Yeah, the innovation – I mean, if you said this now, you probably would – nobody
would think of it as an innovation. But the fact was that at the time, this was late ‘60s,
if you were a really top notch geologist then you were going to be doing plate
tectonics. You know, you were in the revolution, you know, so – or in the structural
areas. As I say, in Imperial you would have been in a structural – structural geology,
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the things that Ramsay did were, you know, sort of regarded as sort of a really big
thing. And a lot of people around the world were doing these sorts of things. Now
for volcanoes, for reasons which I suspect are just historical, the people who had been
looking at volcanoes very largely had been thinking of them as chemical systems.
They were interested where these lavas came from, why did you melt the earth, why
does it have – why does the lava have a particular chemical composition, why does it
have particular minerals in it, what do those minerals tell you about the depth from
which the lava’s coming. And that was the big interest. And it came at the time of
plate tectonics, so, you know, people were asking the questions, was the chemistry of
the volcanoes the same where the plates pulled apart and where they pushed together,
and of course they weren’t. And so the questions that were being asked were largely I
would say sort of chemical questions about, you know, why the – big scale pictures,
why the volcanoes – how do they relate to the plate’s chemistry. What George did
was he said, well, particularly with pyroclastic rocks, which are the products of
explosions, where you have an explosion and you produce layers of volcanic ash,
what on earth are these, you know, what – how did these form, what are the physical
processes that formed these and how can I make some observations that help me
understand what went on. And that was what he was interested in and he realised that
the thing to do was firstly to collect a lot of data in the field. So he was very much a
scientist who was of the opinion that data is the king. He really – he knew, you can
have a lot of talk but unless you’ve got some data to back up what you’re saying then
that’s really not a very useful thing to do. And so his view was you just collect lots of
data but not blindly, you – his great skill as a scientist was he had a real intuition for
what sort of data would give him insights into – into what had happened. And he – he
was at the vanguard of this idea of making physical measurements in the field and
then trying to relate these physical relationships – observations to physical processes
rather than chemical processes. And that’s what he did. And, you know, it sounds
like it – you should have, you know, the science had already been going for seventy
years so you would have – you might have expected people to have done this, but they
actually hadn’t. Very, very few people had really looked at volcanic rocks and said,
well, these are produced by physical processes, even though it’s completely obvious.
And now that dominates the – it has a huge, you know, it’s like an enormous, you
know, thousands and thousands of people are doing that sort of work nowadays, but in
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those days it was really just George and one or two other scientists round the world
who were thinking that way.
[1:47:59]
So you were in this particular field region and you had layers of volcanic deposits.
Yes.
And you had to in some way map these and try and infer from whatever data you were
collecting, the physical processes by which this had all come down.
Yes, that’s right, yes.
Rather than just looking at the chemical properties of the magma or the exclusion at
that place as opposed to this other place.
That’s right, yeah.
So let’s have you sort of in the field. What do you do day to day to collect this?
Yeah. I mean, the – some fairly obvious things that you might do, and we did. I
mean, if you have an ash layer from a particular eruption you might simply go and
measure the thickness of the ash layer around the volcano and then contour up a map
and from that map of thickness and area you can get a volume. You can find out how
much was erupted. So you need to do [more than] just measuring the thickness. If
you want to know how powerful the eruption might have been, well, maybe the more
powerful the eruption, the bigger the rock fragments you see in the deposit at a greater
distance from the volcano. So if you go around and you measure the size of the
fragments then you – all other things being equal, you would sort of expect – and I’m
sort of simplifying a lot here, but the concept is you’d sort of expect a bigger volcanic
explosion would – you would get bigger fragments further from the volcanic vent. So
you would go around and you’d make measurements of the largest fragments you
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could see and you would then plot those on a map and contour them and try and
interpret that. And then you might – if it’s a deposit, a very young deposit that’s been
from a new eruption, that hasn’t been turned to a rock yet, it’s just loose ash or loose
volcanic fragments, you can of course take a sample and you can do a grain size
analysis, find out the distribution of grains. You can look at the physical shape of the
grains, are they rounded or are they angular. So if they’ve been broken up in an
explosion so they’re angular or they’ve been rounded by some flow process, you
know, like in a river but in a volcanic current. You can measure the shapes of the
fragments and the inside – if it’s a piece of pumice you can look at the gas bubbles
that have formed, are they big, are they small, what can you tell from that. So you can
measure the physical attributes of the deposit. If there’s a volcanic current
transporting deposits, just like a wind forms sand dunes, then the volcanic deposit can
form a sort of sand dune and geologists will then – if you’ve got this sort of dune like
structure you can measure the angles of the sand dune, is the sand dune like that, a
sort of sharp, you know, sort of something that sticks up in the air, or is it a low
amplitude thing which is low and thin and not very tall. So you can make a
measurement like that. And then you can say, well, what does that mean, how can I
interpret that. So those are – and that’s really what George fundamentally did, I
mean, these very straightforward measurements where all you need is a ruler, a map, a
hammer and a hand lens, the simple instruments of a geologists, and take some bags
to take the samples and that’s – and you go away and do it.
And how did you get access to sort of sections around this particular caldera?
There are quarries, there are road cuts. There are little cuts in farmer’s fields, all sorts
of places where you can go. There are rivers cutting the rocks so that the rocks are
exposed, all sorts of ways. There are lots of – that’s part of the world where, you
know, it’s really quite easy to find what we call outcrops. I mean, places where you
can take samples, make measurements.
Did you do any sort of coring in order to cut through yourself?
No.
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I see.
But of course you could do that. You know, in a PhD, you know, unless you’ve got
access to a mining company or something like that, you don’t – no, these would be all
very simple measurements made on the rocks that are available.
[1:52:29]
What relations did you have with local people during this fieldwork?
Oh, it was quite interesting, ‘cause it’s in rural Italy and you – in a wonderful part of
the world and, you know, because people are always very curious about what you’re
doing and so, you know, occasionally somebody would drag you into a farm to get
you to taste some rough wine or give you an egg or something strange, or, you know,
people would just ask you and you’d try and answer them in sort of very bad Italian.
And that was, you know, that was part of the sort of charm of the area. And it’s a
beautiful area ‘cause there are all these wonderful little medieval villages stuck on
some of the hills, which have, you know, sort of hardly changed since the fourteenth
century and so it’s a – just a fantastic area.
To what extent were local people useful in pointing out where you might find outcrops
or – I suppose it’s a general question about the role of local knowledge in doing this.
Yes. I mean, occasionally you would – and I mean, I’m not, you know, since then
you occasionally find local knowledge is really very helpful. You know, you sort of
explain, you know, a cava, I want a sort of quarry to – and they’ll say, well, there’s
one down that road. So it can be useful on occasions. But by and large you’re sort of
just tramping round the countryside and you’ll see these places and maybe there’s
some rock in a farmyard and you’ll ask – obviously out of politeness you’ll ask the
farmer whether you can go and look at it and they usually say yes. So yes, so that’s
interesting. I wouldn’t say it was very – in that particular case, very strong, the
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interaction with the local people apart from just, you know, to sort of just say –
passing the time of day really.
And how did you find the experience of doing something which from the outside might
seem quite solitary, if you like, you know, mapping an area alone?
Yeah. Part of geology is quite solitary. I mean, you’re there wanting to make the
measurements and you of course get absorbed by those – that work and you want –
and so often the days pass quite – can pass quite quickly. And then of course if you’re
camped at the time – I was camped on the lake, so you could go back and cook some
food and have a nice swim or something like that, and so it was a nice – it was a sort
of really nice environment to do. And not much rain, like Iceland, so it was a very
different sort of fieldwork.
And what did you come home with? What was the – in physical terms, what was the
product? And if you can give us a sense of the amount of it, you know, so –
Yeah. Well, there’d basically be plastic bags full of grey and white powder. So I did
have an interesting time at Rome railway station, explaining to customs what these
bags of white powder might be, but fortunately was able to explain that that’s – they
were volcanic ash so they were – it didn’t cause any problems. But I know of other
geologists in the same field who’ve had sort of incidents of trying to explain what
their bags of white powder actually are [laughs]. But – so that’s what you do, you
bring them back to the lab and you pass them through some sieves to get the range of
grain sizes, and you might measure the density of the particles and things like that.
Again, fairly physical – simple physical measurements actually by and large.
And what came back with you in terms of written records or notes or maps?
You’d come back with a field notebook, a location plotted on a map. When you got
back to Imperial College you’d do a neat version of the map with the field locations or
maybe the thickness of the, you know, the map showing the thickness of the layers or
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the size of the fragments. So that – yeah, that’s what you’d do. Again, pretty simple
physical measurements.
And were you able, based on this data, to make any arguments about the physical
processes that must have been involved in using this sort of spread of debris, if you
like?
Yes. I – oh yeah, absolutely. In fact, we – I think at the time, myself and my fellow
student Steve Self, we – with George, we wrote a couple of very – now regarded as
sort of seminal papers on the subject. And we discovered a lot.
[1:57:07]
And I think that’s probably where I would think of myself as having really put some
of my own, you know, obviously the style of research and the methodology and the
intuition that George had had an enormous role in guiding, you know, sort of young
inexperienced students in the science. So we obviously – those papers have an awful
lot to do with George’s brilliance. I think where I really – I really sort of made a
significant contribution at the time, is in two ways. One is – and this is – I’m not sure
I ca properly explain this easily. The first thing is, you probably noticed I didn’t do
physics at all at school, but I realised that I had to learn some of the appropriate
physics to understand what I was looking at, physics of flows and physics of how
rocks fall through the air and so forth, because we were trying to interpret the geology
in terms of essentially fluid mechanics and physics. So I had to firstly learn a lot of –
quite a lot of relevant physics. The second point was George was not a very good
mathematician at all. He didn’t think – in fact his maths was really rather poor, and
he didn’t think in any way mathematically, he thought intuitively. And so he was
rather curious in the way that he had his intuition about physical processes and he had
really deep insights into physical processes, but he didn’t think about them in any way
in a mathematical sense, as a mathematician would. He didn’t think about describing
the things he was suggesting. And a lot of his suggestions turned out to be completely
right. He didn’t think about describing those in mathematical terms, it was much
more intuitive, you know, this is like a river or it’s like a waterfall or it’s – so by
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analogies sometimes. He also had a tremendous ability to get data and then find the
right way of plotting that data or presenting or analysing that data in a way which was
very insightful. He seemed to have a real knack of choosing the right way to present
data. And again it was this intuition. But it has to be said, he wasn’t a great
mathematician at all and yet I’d got an interest in maths and I could start reading up
some of the sort of physical aspects of this and started to teach myself a little bit about
physics. And then the other thing I realised was – I took up a very old suggestion that
these volcanic flows were what – were analogous to what people call a fluidised bed.
I don’t know if you know anything about those, but if you – if you get, say, a cylinder
of sand or salt and you have a porous base and you pass gas through it, or water, and it
flows up through the spaces between the grains, you’ll get to a condition where the
upward flow balances the friction of the particles and you get to what’s called a
fluidised bed, where the sand or – will behave just like a fluid, absolutely like a fluid.
It’s like a quicksand, you know, there’s analogy with quicksand in an estuary. And
this is used hugely in industry for chemical engineering in particular because you get
very fast reactions between gases and solids by passing a gas through a bed of solids
in a fluidised condition. Or if you’re in a factory, you’re looking for fast food
transport, in order to transport frozen peas quickly, you fluidise them because then the
particles lose their friction between them and they flow just like a liquid. So this is a
very dramatic effect. And I thought that this is a really good idea so I went – as a PhD
student, I went round to the chemical engineering department in Imperial College,
where they had one of – some world class engineers, who did fluidisation engineering,
and I sort of looked at their apparatus and they showed me some of these phenomena
in the lab and I thought, well, this must be what’s happening and I can interpret my
data from the Italian volcano in terms of these processes. So I then built up my own
apparatus. I got a cylinder and I got some gas and I started playing around myself. I
did some experiments at the time and I tested out a couple of ideas and they worked
really well. And I could then use the understanding of the physics of these fluidised
beds to interpret what I was seeing in the geology.
Wow. Can you describe those – firstly describe the simple apparatus that you made
in order to –
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Yep, it’s just – if you imagine a plastic tube, which is about, say, eight inches across,
maybe two foot tall, so it’s just a cylinder, at the base of it I have a porous plate, so in
order words a plate which holds the solids. It’s a solid base but it’s got little holes in
it, which then – if I pump gas through the bottom, the gas will go through the holes
and then will flow through a bed of sand that you put in the bed. Okay, so that’s – if
you then have a gas cylinder you turn the gas on and you pump the gas through the
bed of sand. It will fluidise and it’ll show this behaviour. Now to give you an idea, a
more graphic idea, what would happen would be, if I had this bed of sand and I put a
– before I put the sand in the cylinder I put a plastic duck at the bottom of the sand,
fill it up with sand and then I put a rock, a heavy rock, on top of the sand, they’re
going nowhere very slowly, they just stay there. The strength of this bed of sand is
sufficient that, although the rock’s heavier than the sand, it won’t fall through the sand
because the sand is behaving like a solid material. Now if I pass a little bit of gas up
through the sand and it reaches this point where it fluidises, where the friction
between the sand grains, which is making it strong, disappears or it goes down to
negligible values, the whole bed of sand becomes like a liquid and it behaves just like
a liquid. So the duck floats to the top of the sand bed and the rock goes to the bottom.
So the heavy particle’s gone to the bottom and the light one’s gone to the top, almost
instantaneously. So when I go in the field and I’m measuring these deposits in Italy,
what I’m observing is – very commonly I see deposits which I know have been
produced by a flow of particles, volcanic flow of particles, and it contains lumps of
pumice, which is [are] light, and then rock fragments, which are heavy. And then
when I look I see that the pumice is all at the top and the rock fragments are all at the
bottom. Now if that was – if that was just the volcanic ash just like a bed of sand,
then how can I have got these heavy and light particles to have separated. And of
course the answer is fluidisation, that the flow had volcanic gases in as well as ash
when it flowed and these gases escaped, fluidising the flow and therefore the pumice
could float and the rock fragments could sink. And then of course as the rock
fragments sink they get – the bigger ones sink near the volcano, the smaller rock
fragments sink a bit further from the volcano and the little ones go to the end, a long
way from the volcano. And therefore when I do a map I see that the big rock
fragments are close to the volcano, I see that’s what I observe. The pumices, which
float, of course they never fall out at all because they carry on, they’re just floating.
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So they go – really big lumps of pumice are transported right to as far as you can go,
you know, twenty, thirty kilometres from the volcano. And you still see them there
and that’s because they floated. So I could explain what I saw from these simple
measurements in the field very nicely through – by combining a physical experiment
and thinking about the physics of that process. And I think because I had some – as I
say, some basic mathematics and a slight interest in it and I’d also been, you know, I
could see that mathematics and experiments were going to help me – I mean, George
did very few experiments, he wasn’t an experimentalist. So again, I could – I sort of
brought that into the milieu of the ideas that were coming around at the time. So I
could bring in these sort of physical ideas and the mathematical analysis, the physics,
to help explain the geology we were seeing.
[2:07:06]
How – when you started exploring sort of physics and engineering as a way to try and
understand what you were seeing in the field, how long did it take to hit upon
fluidised beds as the explanation among all of the other kind of physical processes
that you might encounter if you’re starting to look at literature in physics? Was it the
first – sort of the first thing you hit upon?
No, it wasn’t, no, not in any way. I think I started thinking this way probably towards
the end of the second year of the PhD. And both myself and Steve Self, who was
working in the Azores, and another student [Adrienne Bond] who was working in
Greece, we’d all seen these things and George had seen them in different volcanoes,
so we were pretty sure that, you know, the things I was seeing in Italy weren’t just
sort of some oddball thing but they were something very general that you could see in
all the volcanoes round the world. And so we were sort of trying to think what this
could mean. And I’m not sure I can really remember quite why I thought fluidisation
might be – I started reading some of the old – I think probably it was – there were a
couple of early papers, one in the ‘50s, where a female geologist called Doris
Reynolds [wife of Arthur Holmes] had sort of vaguely suggested that fluidisation
might occur in nature and, you know, explained various geological phenomena. And
I think it was almost like a throwaway line that this might happen in volcanic systems.
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And then there was a later paper by some Americans, which would have been early
‘60s, where a guy took – he heated up some powder in the laboratory and he put the
powder down a shoot and he noticed that the powder when it was hot was [travelled]
much further than when it was cold. And he said, well, this must be some sort of
fluidisation. It was a bit vague but it was – so the sort of embryonic idea was already
there in the literature. And at that time in the early ‘60s, this is an interesting aspect
of science, I could read absolutely everything that had been ever written about this
particular topic as a PhD student. If I took this same topic and I asked a new PhD
student to read everything that had ever been written about this same topic, they
would need ten years to do their PhD. So, you know, at the time there was a really
rather small literature, something that – a single PhD student could get to grips with
everything that had been written. And these two sort of rather vague ideas had been
put forward that fluidisation might partly play a role. And so I think that’s probably
why I decided – and then I knew that the chemical engineers, you know, I’d sort of
found the chemical engineers at Imperial were really top notch and they actually had
apparatus where you could see this happening, so I went over and sort of talked to
them.
[2:10:22]
What was George’s view of what you were doing?
I think he really liked it. I mean, he really liked having PhD students who were sort
of independent and had their own ideas. He never imposed ideas on people. I mean,
he was quite – he was, you know, he was a person who had very well thought out
views and arguments and so it was – he would, you know, he would – against some
inexperienced PhD student he would essentially [laughs] know an awful lot and so –
but he didn’t – he didn’t impose his ideas on people. And I think he liked the fact that
his PhD students were coming up with sort of new ways of thinking about things.
And how then did the PhD develop from there?
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Well, we published the paper – well, two of the papers, which subsequently – the first
paper was in Nature, a little paper, and then one in Geology, which was sort of in and
around the ideas I’ve just described. And then I had a sort of more conventional map
on the geology of this area. And then – I mean, I should say that there were quite a lot
of – that that pumice and rock fragment, there were quite a few other things that we
observed and deduced, which have turned out to be really important at the time. So
we published this paper in Geology, which has subsequently been very highly cited,
and I then – and the last year of my PhD, I – George thought, okay, you’ve done this
work here, and you should go to Santorini in Greece, where the big eruption happened
in the Bronze Age, and you should look at the deposits from that eruption. And he
had another PhD student who was working on that topic. So I went over to Santorini
with a girl called Adrienne Bond, who was another PhD student at the time, and we
did – the beginning of my third year, we did some – quite a lot of work on Santorini.
And we mapped – did the same sort of stuff and we saw the same sort of
relationships, but it also got me into unravelling the story of this huge late Bronze Age
eruption, which was supposed to be cataclysmic for the ancient world and it’s, you
know, there’s all the archaeological story and mythical story around it. And I got
really interested in that so that sort of took me in a slightly different direction. And
that actually determined where I – what happened next, as it were.
How – in what way then is this site different from the previous site, Bolsena?
Not – in general not very different, similar sort of volcano, very big explosive
eruptions which happen infrequently but when they do they produce sort of gigantic
deposits.
So it was the stories and the archaeological evidence around this one that was
significant?
No. The only reason I went there was to see – look at another volcano and see if the
same things that I saw in the Italian one were going on. But in going there and then
sort of getting involved in studying the late Bronze Age eruption of Santorini,
inevitably you were drawn into other areas of endeavour, like the myths around
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Atlantis and the archaeology site that had been discovered there and the Minoans and
all that aspect. So it sort of brought you into a different arena of – where volcanology,
you know, I suppose it was my sort of opening – well, I’ve got one sort of story that
we should include in but I’ll – if you remind me about Iceland and Heimaey, I’ll come
back to that. But just to continue with Santorini, it just got you into a different, you
know, other aspects of volcano eruptions, what the impact of eruptions – how huge
eruptions had played into human history, things like that. So I just got interested in –
that interested me.
[2:15:01]
What I should say is that probably my biggest – one of my biggest breaks in hindsight
during my PhD was that George – George had a research assistant who was another
very eccentric man called Basil Booth, and whenever there was an eruption – they’d
go – whenever there was an eruption somewhere Basil and George would go and sort
of go and watch the volcano and make measurements directly on the eruption. And in
1973, so this would be in the sort of second year of my – well into the second year of
my PhD, the island of Heimaey in Iceland erupted, south of Iceland, and there was a
significant volcanic eruption there. It happened in January and George and Basil
would undoubtedly have gone to make observations on the eruption if they had been
around, but they were off in Tenerife doing some fieldwork, their own fieldwork, and
so they were away when this eruption started. And so myself and Steve Self, my
fellow student, we sort of talked to John Sutton, you know, the professor, and he’s an
FRS and big noise. It was the sort of time when – the Royal Society still does sponsor
urgency responses to sort of natural phenomena, but at the time it was sort of – it was
a bit more, you know, sort of not quite so formal, the ways of applying. So John
Sutton said, ‘Oh, you lads should go out there and see this volcano.’ So he went to
the Royal Society, got these two young students – he said, ‘George isn’t around, we
can’t ask him, we should have a sort of British presence of some sort.’ So he got us
some money from the Royal Society, this is John Sutton, and so Steve and I went out
in the first week of the eruption and we spent a few days on the island watching the
eruption and making observations.
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Firstly could you – from a sort of spectator point of view, what did it – if you take
yourself back there, what did it look like, for people who haven’t seen?
Well, it’s really – well, the first thing is we arrived in Reykjavik – and this is the
middle of January where it’s dark virtually all the time apart from between about ten
thirty and three in the afternoon. And being pretty naïve and inexperienced, we
hadn’t really – we sort of went to the local institution and asked whether we could go
out and see the volcano and they were very reluctant to let us go out at all. And
eventually we managed to persuade them that we should go out – we could go out for
three or four days, and they eventually agreed to that. And so we went down to the
south of Iceland and then – the only way of getting to the island was by about a five
hour tug ride across in incredibly rough weather, so we were both horribly seasick,
got into the port at Heimaey, and then of course you see this spectacular thing. The
volcano at the time was very active and you’ve got these spurts of – like a giant
firework display, spurts of molten rock going two, three hundred metres into the air
and this great huge cone of volcanic cinders and bombs being deposited, forming a
new volcano. And so we came in of course in the dark and it was absolutely
spectacular. And it was really, as I say, sort of – I’d never seen an erupting volcano
before, it was my first experience, so it really was, you know, sort of an awe inspiring
thing to see. And we only had about three days on the volcano and we slept in the
local museum and we really hadn’t brought much – we’d brought some sleeping bags
with us. And the Icelanders – they were evacuating the town and it was sort of really
a volcanic emergency. And so they really weren’t going to spend a lot of time with a
couple of young Brits who’d arrived sort of largely unannounced. And so they
allowed us to sleep in the museum but we had to sleep in sleeping bags on a hard
floor, and I remember – there were earthquakes going on and I remember we didn’t
get much sleep ‘cause we were – we were in this museum with lights in the cabinets,
with sort of stuffed seagulls and herons surrounding us, and at the same time there
were little earthquakes going on and then there was ash sort of – not really fine ash
but really quite large lumps of volcanic fragments a few centimetres across landing on
the roof of the museum at times. And there was – often you could hear the
explosions. Now of course we didn’t get much sleep too ‘cause we just wanted to go
and look at the volcano and we did quite a lot of volcano watching, but then during
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the daylight hours we would – I did some filming, I’d taken some film with me, and I
took some film from a known position, and then Steve and I went round and we made
the same measurements – exactly the same measurements I’ve been describing from
Italy with the size of the fragments and the thickness, and we went around during the
eruption measuring the deposit on the ground. And so we came back with two very
nice pieces of data or information. One was the film of the explosions and the other
was the particles. Now actually it turns out that despite – for reasons – well, I don’t
know what the reasons are, we published the only ever map – published map of that
eruption of the grain size. And so we saw the volcano. But unlike the work I was
describing before where you’re trying to reconstruct what happened in an old volcano,
which you – what the processes are but you’ve never actually see them, here we had
an opportunity of making the same sorts of measurements but we’re actually seeing
what sort of activity is creating those deposits. So we could link the deposits on the
ground with the activity of the volcano. And that’s really what we did and what I’ve
been doing a lot of ever since. You know, you obviously have a lot more information
about the physics if you can see it happening and so we could do that. And then we
had the film and these – we made – I took the film back. I didn’t do it during my PhD
but in one of my post docs I – I actually digitised the – not digitised, that’s what you
do now, but I looked at them frame by frame and I followed individual particles and I
worked out the – I knew where the camera was so I could work out – and the scale, so
I could work out the trajectories of the particles and I could measure – by inference I
could measure the velocity of the jet coming out of the volcano and that led to making
some of the very first observations of volcanic jets. And then of course you could use
those measurements to look at the physics of the jets. Now that came later but I got
the information during those three days. So that was very pivotal because, as I say,
that was a wonderful opportunity for two young scientists to see a real volcano.
What could you see in terms of sort of – I understand that from a distance you can see
stuff coming out of the top, but what could you see in terms of flows or ways in which
stuff was being distributed and deposited? What could you see of that?
Well, you could see – as I say, you would get these – you’d get discrete explosions,
bursts and then a little bit of quiet and then another burst happening every few
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seconds, and every time there was a burst you’d get a jet of hot molten rocks and ash
coming out of the volcano at 150 metres per second, spurting up to perhaps a couple
of hundred metres in what we call a fire fountain. And then as this jet, hot jet, mixes
with the air, it all cools down and you get a big black cloud rising above that and then
a lot of the bigger fragments then fall down by the side of this jet and build up this –
what we call a volcanic cone. And further away from the volcano the particles land
and they get smaller away from the volcano, that’s what we measured. And then
sometimes you’d get continuous – for several minutes you’d just get continued
roaring, like sort of a continual jet coming out of the volcano, and you could hear the
roaring and hissing of this jet just like the back of, you know, an aircraft engine. So
these things were really quite noisy, yep, and just very spectacular.
Is there a particular smell associated with it? We’ve got the noise and the sight of it.
Yes, there’ll be a bit of sulphur dioxide that you can sometimes get a sniff of if the
wind’s blowing in the right direction, so you could smell some of the sulphur.
And you were measuring particles that were actually landing?
No, not at the time. We tried to avoid that. Again, I think we might have worn hard
hats, I’m not – yes, we did wear hard hats. I think again, the health and safety people
these days would probably have kittens about what we did. But we went round and,
you know, when the volcano was quiet or the wind was blowing in the other direction,
we would go to the side of the volcano where nothing was landing and we’d look at
what had landed.
Sort of the previous day or –
The previous day or night, and then we’d make measurements of that, and take
samples, of course. So that was, as I say, a great experience. Scientifically it was
important because we could then go one step from looking at things where we didn’t
know what exactly had happened and we were trying to infer what had happened, to
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looking at things where we could see what was produced but we could also see what
happened to produce it.
Were there other volcanologists there?
There weren’t, no, not – I mean – sorry, there was the Iceland team, the emergency
people, but they really didn’t worry too much about what we did. They were too busy
dealing with the emergency.
[2:26:25]
Thank you. So what’s the next stage in the – this happens towards the end of the PhD,
this –
This is about January 1973, so it would have been roughly halfway – just over
halfway through the PhD. And it wasn’t included in the PhD, none of this – we
published a paper, it wasn’t a chapter in the PhD or anything. So I then started to get
this interest in physics of volcanic eruptions and I very nearly got a job in the Rabaul
Volcanic Observatory in Papua New Guinea. I was offered a job there at the end of
the PhD and I was almost going to take that but I also applied for a fellowship from
something called the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. I don’t know if
you know about that.
I know a little bit about it, only because John Dewey is –
Oh yeah, he’s on their board, isn’t he?
Yeah.
That’s right. So that’s the, you know, the Great Exhibition of 1851, made an
enormous profit from – and that money was invested in science for the
commonwealth so you could – and you can still apply for fellowships. So I got one of
those for two years and I went to Lancaster University. And the reason I chose to go
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to Lancaster was that there was a young physicist called Lionel Wilson, who was a
lecturer there. He was certainly, you know, old compared to me but at the time he
was sort of – in his sort of early stage of his career. And Lionel was interested in
planetology and he was interested in physics of eruptions and eruptions. And he had
done some work with George, so George was sort of aware that he [George] wasn’t a
mathematician himself and that also he wasn’t, you know, experiments weren’t really
his thing. But he got together with Lionel, this was while I was doing my PhD, and
they did some interesting work, like throwing bits of pumice down the lift shaft of
Imperial College to measure the velocities. And Lionel was a pretty, you know, a
pretty good physicist and he started to get interested in volcanic processes in physics.
And [coughs] I chose Lancaster because I thought Lionel would be a good guy to
work with. And so that’s what I did, I went up to Lancaster and started a very strong
and productive collaboration with Lionel. I learnt a tremendous amount of physics
from him. And I learnt some important skills. I learnt how to code in FORTRAN and
run my own computer programmes. I learnt how to do finite element difference sort
of calculations, simple – at the time simple numerical calculations. And so Lionel and
I worked quite closely – very closely together and over the two years we – I think we
did probably one of the most important step forwards in volcanology in hindsight and
we published those papers and, as I say, we just – it was a very good strong
collaboration. And I also started – did some work with a chap called Harry Pinkerton,
who was a young geologist up there at the time, and we worked – we did – we went
and did fieldwork on the lavas of Etna together and we did quite a lot of work
measuring lava flows in the field. So I did two [coughs] main things. I worked with –
well, three actually. I worked with Lionel a lot. I worked with Harry on lava flows.
And I worked – I developed my own model of bubble growth in magmas.
[2:31:10]
So if I sort of deconstruct that a little bit for you, the work I did with Lionel was
explaining why volcanoes have two fundamental styles of behaviour. I mean, these
have been known for a long time. But really surprisingly, they hadn’t been explained
by any physical process. And Lionel and I realised that, if you have a very high speed
jet going into the Earth’s atmosphere, you can get two outcomes. One is that the jet
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heats up enough air that the whole mixture becomes buoyant and therefore you get a
gigantic eruption column going up to the stratosphere and all the fragments fall out
over a wide area. Or the jet can come out of the volcano and although it mixes with
air, it’s still denser than the atmosphere and so when it runs out of – it’s going up just
like a sort of thrown cricket ball in the air, it eventually runs out of potential energy,
gets to a height and if that mixture’s then denser than the air it all collapses like a
fountain and flows along the ground and produces these very devastating flows. Now
the phenomena had been recognised for sixty or seventy years but there’d been no
physical explanation at all, literally none. And what Lionel and I did was we did very
simple fluid mechanical models, which showed how this worked quantitatively and
physically, and then we obviously published the papers. But that was explaining
probably sort of one of the big issues in volcanology, why you’ve got these two styles
of activity.
[End of Track 1]
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Track 2
Could you describe in as much detail as you can, sort of step by step, what’s involved
in producing what I think you called fluid mechanical models to explain why jets have
these sort of two fates, either the high atmosphere or the low.
Yeah. Well, what – I mean, what got us thinking about it was observation again,
because we had observed these two styles of activity and Lionel and I started to think
through why it would behave one way or behave the other way. And we realised of
course that the fundamentals – and this was a little – I mean, it does link back to the
fact that we went to this Iceland volcano and I filmed these jets and it became obvious
that the stuff coming out of the volcano was a bit like, you know, the stuff out of the
back of a jet engine. It’s a really fast turbulent flow of gas. And we realised that the
fundamental feature of that is – of these volcanic jets is that they’re not just pure gas,
they’re a mixture of gases and particles, and so they’re what fluid mechanicists would
call a two phase mixture. And these mixtures – we knew from the – when we looked
at the fluid mechanics literature, and there’s a very long history of fluid mechanics
about jets and plumes, that these flows – if it was two phased then it was really
different from what most people had studied in fluid mechanics, which would be pure
fluids or pure gases. And at the time there was work in the fluid mechanics literature
on two phase, you know, mixtures of solids and gases or mixtures of solids and fluids,
but nothing that we knew of that was sort of directly applicable to the volcanoes. So
what Lionel did, who was, as I say, a very fine physicist, was he looked at the basic
equations which describe jets, how they behave, and we realised that these high speed
jets would be very hot but they would mix with cold air. And the thing that slows a
jet down, makes it stop, is the fact that the jet has to drag in bits of air which are at
standstill and has to accelerate them into – the eddies and the turbulent motions of the
jet drag in air and this slows down the jet, so that makes it stop. On the other hand,
this air, the cold air, is now being heated and cold air when it’s heated expands
dramatically when it’s at high temperature. And this of course makes it lighter, lower
density. So we’ve got two counteracting things, we’re slowing down this jet, which is
essentially losing energy. At the same time we’re heating up the air from the hot
volcanic particles and that’s actually creating energy because we’re taking heat from
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the particles and we’re heating air and that’s creating an energy. And so those two
things are competing and I suppose you could say that the volcano behaves in – if the
heating is the winner then the whole mixture coming out of the volcano is going to be
lighter than the atmosphere and it’s just going to go up, you know, going to go very
high in the atmosphere. Whereas if the dragging in of the air wins and the energy loss
associated with that is more important than the heating then it will run out of energy
quite low in the atmosphere and then it’ll just collapse because it’s denser than air and
it’ll run – it’ll then just be like a river that’ll run down the volcano as a hot current,
something we call a pyroclastic flow. So those are – now okay, to understand that
more quantitatively you have to of course do the sums. You have to put up the
equations which describe the energy balance and the momentum balance of the flows
and the energy exchanges that take place. And when you – and then you can basically
do a calculation to say when the volcano will behave in one way or another way and
that’s really what Lionel and I did. I mean, as I say, I would say Lionel took the lead
in looking at the right equations to describe this and I took the lead in sort of
converting – putting the right parameters, you know, putting the right numbers into
the equations, which I thought were appropriate for a volcanic jet. And so then Lionel
ran the computer codes, you know, developed the computer codes to solve the
equations. I put in the numbers or would suggest the numbers that should go – the
appropriate numbers to go in, and then we mapped out when the volcano behaved in
one way or the other. And that’s really how it happened and that led us to sort of the
basic – this basic idea that – and then we did one other thing, which is – for the case
where the heat wins and so the volcanic eruption turns into what we call a giant
plume, the physics is very, very like the smoke coming out of a factory chimney or
smoke above a bonfire. The bonfire is heating the air, making it lighter and therefore
it rises high in the atmosphere. And the physics of a volcano is – in this particular
case, you know, the one where the heating wins, is just like that. And then you can
predict how high for a given energy flux – in other words, if you have a little bonfire
then the smoke won’t go very high. If you have a big bonfire the smoke will go a lot
higher in the atmosphere. And we applied that same physics and the mathematics
behind it and we worked out the relationship between the intensity of the eruption, the
explosion, and how high it went in the atmosphere. We then looked at all the data that
we could find and we found this theory worked extraordinary well and we published
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another paper, which is you know, sort of, I think, you know, sort of the first – the
first establishment of the sort of physics of volcanic plumes.
[07:04]
Where were you doing this work? Can you sort of describe the place where this going
on?
Well, this was all in Lancaster University, which was a sort of modern ‘60s building
with sort of, you know, all modern buildings. I mean, we were just in sort of regular
old, you know, not old but new offices of a ‘60s university. Yeah, so sort of not – but
not particularly extraordinary an environment to do work. I mean, it’s a nice
university and a good university but –
And where was the computer that was being used?
Oh, well this was a giant old mainframe, which is probably 100 times less powerful
than, you know, your iPod or something like that now, but one of these sort of giant
things with cards, you know. We had these punched – in those days you wrote your
card, FORTRAN code, by punching, you know, writing the code, getting a series of
cards – I don’t know whether you’re going to be seeing these. But you then put them
in a kind of relay and the machine reads off – you punch in and it produces holes in
the card and you put it on the machine and the machine just takes the cards and reads
them sequentially for the code and then a day later you get your output. And then you
find it’s all gone horribly wrong and you’ve done some mess up with the code and it
didn’t work very well [laughs] and therefore you have to do it again. So it was – as I
say, the power of the computer there, I’m sure there’s a sort of – I don’t know, it’s
probably – I’ve got a Mac in the office, a Mac laptop, like everybody and that’s
probably infinitely more powerful than that whole code [I meant Lancaster computer
system].
Was it actually on site?
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Oh, it’s on the site, yeah, as you went into the computer centre and you submitted
your cards and they got fed into the machine, the reader, and you got your paper print
output.
[08:59]
And what did the model tell you about what – I don’t know, what initial conditions or
what conditions as this eruption develops determine whether it’s going to be –
Yeah. Well, that was the key thing, that we found some very nice simple
relationships. We found out that if the amount of gas in the magma was quite high, it
would promote the behaviour where everything goes up because there’s less hot solids
and more gas, so it’s lighter. And so we found that – and also if it had more gas in it
was a stronger jet. The gas gave the energy to the jet, so a bigger amount of gas
meant more expansion in the atmosphere, a faster jet. And so that would promote the
style which went up to very high levels, the plume model. If the vent was very wide –
the wider the vent had the opposite effect because if you have a volcanic nozzle or a
volcanic vent and you make it wider then it takes longer to mix the air into the jet
because it’s simply wider and therefore it runs out of energy before it can take in
enough air to heat up, and therefore that promotes the collapse. So we found these
simple relationships. And there’s also a pressure effect as well, the pressure of the jet
makes a difference. But we found some very simple rules and those simple rules
amount to – that the more powerful the eruption, the more the tendency is for
producing the collapse – the unstable eruptions and the collapses and these flows that
go along the ground.
The more powerful the eruptions?
Yeah, on average the more powerful. But it’s not a sort of simple linear thing. I
mean, it’s not that weak eruptions produce one and powerful ones produce the other,
it’s much more to do with the geometry and the gas content, but on the whole bigger
eruptions are more likely to produce these collapsing columns. But we – so – but we
also were able to explain the geology very nicely and when we, you know, if I took
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you to Pompeii and Vesuvius and you looked at the layers that had buried Pompeii,
the first thing you would see would be a layer of pumice, which forms from one of
these very high columns where they form – the heating wins and the column goes up
very high. And you go to Pompeii and you would see this deposit at the bottom. And
then you’d see that Pompeii was wiped out by these horizontal flows from Vesuvius,
where the column collapsed, and that happened later in the eruption. Now we see that
all the time in the geology, that sequence is a very common sequence, and it’s quite
nicely explained by the model because early on in eruption the gas tends to have
accumulated early on at the top of – in the early stages of an eruption there tends to be
more gas, but the conduit tends to be very narrow because it’s early in the eruption
and this favours the high column. As the eruption goes on the bits of the crater wall
fall in, bits of it get broken off and the volcanic conduit, the nozzle, if you like,
widens and sometimes the gas goes down a bit. But the main thing is the conduit
widens as the volcano continues to erupt and as it widens it gets more and more
favourable to the collapse model. So we go – and when it gets too big or too wide
then the column cannot go very high, it has to collapse and has to go down. So you
go to Pompeii and you can see the layers of pumice and ash and you can explain –
you can give a sort of plausible explanation for what you see.
[13:16]
What did the output of the model look like? You’ve described there the sort of – the
findings the model and the way that the model explains reality –
Yeah.
But what were you actually faced with when you’d – you went back a day later and
you got the output?
Well, firstly to have checked that there weren’t any bugs or there weren’t any errors
or it actually worked at all, which of course – as all computer programmers will know,
it’s usually the case that there’s something wrong or it doesn’t feel right or it just
doesn’t convert – the algorithms just don’t converge or whatever it is. So most of the
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time you’re sort of trying to find the bugs in the programme. But of course when you
do get the results and you’re sort of reasonably confident then of course you can start
plotting out the results and mapping out the behaviours and the regimes. I mean, it’s
worth just – again, it’s probably worth if – these days everybody is fascinated by
impact, you know, everybody’s got to demonstrate that the research they do has
impact. Now when the forecasts were made for the volcanic ash the last couple of
years from Iceland, the Met Office and all the other – whenever there’s an eruption
around the world, have to do a forecast of where the volcanic ash goes and that
forecast involves a simple model of the volcano and a weather forecasting model,
which takes the ash where the weather takes it. The volcano bit is essentially based
on that bit of work that Lionel and I did, that they still use now. So it’s measuring the
height of the eruption column and the volcano, knowing that that height is related to
the amount of ash that’s being driven into the atmosphere, in other words the energy
flux, and then working out how that height relates to the energy flux, so that you can
then – knowing the height, you can know how much ash is being put into the
atmosphere and then you can put the weather on that and find out where it’s going to
go. And so that ’78 work actually is – if you want impact, that work now is the
method that everyone uses in the world to forecast volcanic ash.
What did you feel about the value of the work at the time?
Oh, we were just – well, that’s the point I was going to make. We would have really
no idea that it would have any impact. I suppose it was sort of vaguely, but we
weren’t thinking about impact like as we’re being asked to do at the moment. We
were just doing it because of trying to understand how volcanoes work. And so it was
purely curiosity research and, you know, there wasn’t any sense that this was being
done for the good of society or whatever. The sense was that we just wanted to
understand what these – what volcanoes do.
[16:26]
Did you give this model a name at the time?
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No, not particularly. And, you know, I probably overstated – because like all science,
you know, there’s a very – there’s a tendency – and I perhaps probably strayed over
the line of sort of thinking of all science in terms of sort of eureka moments, where
the sort of – the one or two scientists think of something. I mean, that science was
built on some fantastic research done in Cambridge by applied mathematicians in the
1950s, who understood the physics of plumes and jets. And we – our science was
essentially to some extent derivative. We read up their papers and we looked at how
they described jets and plumes and we applied that same physics to volcanoes. And
we added in the observations so we could compare the predictions of these models.
But fundamentally, if you plot the heights of ash plumes against the intensity of the
eruption and you then draw a line produced by – a theory produced by a great
mathematician called GI Taylor and his students in the 1950s in Cambridge, you’ll
see you don’t have to fit the data to any line, it just – when I show the plot other
people will say, well that’s – is that the best fit. But it’s not the best fit, it’s their little
empirical equation that they derived in 1956. So in a way, you know, the science
builds on previous scientists. I mean, science is in many ways incremental. I mean,
almost the fluidisation story – somebody had that idea and then you build on those
and you make sort of jumps that – it’s sort of a more progressive thing than being just
sort of, you know, distinct eureka moments.
[18:30]
Thank you. Could you now describe the work with – is it Henry –
Harry Pinkerton.
Okay, on the lavas of Etna. What was involved both in the field and not in the field?
Oh well, that was a fantastic time. Harry was a geologist but he had a very – Harry
had two great strengths, certainly one that I don’t have. One was he was – he loved
designing and building scientific instruments and he was very good at it. He had a
sort of engineering bent and he was a very sort of intuitive and systematic scientist.
He was a bit, you know, pretty well the same age as I was, just slightly older. And
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Harry was very interested in the viscosity of magmas, magmas being molten rock and
lavas. And so when I got up to Lancaster Harry and I started talking and we decided
that we were really interested in measuring how lava flows work. And Harry built
some equipment which was to essentially measure the viscosity of lava in the field.
So it’s – viscosity just being a measure of how sticky a liquid – how fast liquids flow.
And so we wanted to know whether, you know, lava – measure the properties –
viscosities of property, which describes how sticky it is, whether it’s honey or water
or very sticky tar or whatever. And Harry built this apparatus and he also built some
other apparatus to measure some temperatures. We had some thermocouples. And
Harry was the person who could, you know, make the instruments and make them
work, make them do good measurements. And so Harry and I and our two wives
went out to Etna and we camped on a snowdrift surrounded by active lava flows for
two weeks. So we took our tents and we took all this kit, and there was a lot of it, up
the mountain. We hired some guys to help us get it up the mountain and we set up
camp on a – the only place to camp on the volcano was on the snowdrifts because
everywhere else was sort of lava rubbles so you couldn’t camp on it. So we camped
on the snowdrifts and then we spent two sort of wonderful weeks making maps of the
lava flows as they actually formed and then we made lots of measurements of the
rheology using Harry’s instrument. And that was a very productive time. We
published a couple of Nature papers from it, one of which was one of the – essentially
some rather rare direct measurements of the properties of – rheological properties of
the lava, the viscosity. And we looked at how the lavas had placed and we started to
think about the physics of lava flows and how – obviously they flow along but they
cool and they solidify and that eventually makes them stop and we wanted to
understand how that happened. And we also got an idea which has turned out to be
very important. I don’t think we can be sort of credited as either the first people or
perhaps the – again it’s rather incremental, but we – that work – we realised that a lot
of volcanic processes, including the ones we’d seen, were not governed by cooling but
they were caused by gases – magmas – molten materials, magmas, losing gas and then
solidifying as a consequence. And we realised that and we published a little paper in
Nature on that. So that was a really great experience because again it was fieldwork
coupled with some sort of – trying to do some sort of physics on it and making some
measurements that we would then use.
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[22:46]
Could you say sort of step by step how you took the measurements in the field of these
lavas?
Well – yeah. I mean, the instrument that Harry produced, and sort of Harry should get
complete credit for this, was what’s called a piston rheometer. What that means is
basically it’s a long steel instrument, about two and half metres long, and at the end of
it is a piston which you push in against a spring of known strength. And then what
you do is you plunge this instrument into the lava flow, you release the spring, which
gives you a known force, which pushes a piston, a cylindrical piston, into the lava.
And then you record – on a chart recorder you record the rate at which this piston
pushes into the lava. And that – if the lava’s more and more viscous and more and
more stiff then obviously for a given force it’ll go in slower, whereas a more fluid
lava, it’ll go in faster. So the rate at which the piston goes into the lava is a measure
of the viscosity. So what you do then is you have to calibrate it. You go back to the
laboratory and you get maybe some honey and golden syrup or tar, things of –
anyway, you get fluids of known viscosity and you push the instrument into those and
you do the same measurements and then you calibrate the instrument and then
interpret the data you got from the field. Now the – I wouldn’t – well, the fun bit of
this is that in a lava flow, obviously if you’ve got a cold steel pushed against the lava
it’ll instantly freeze, so you actually have to pre-warm the instruments. So you have
to keep pushing it into the lava and taking it out and pushing it in so that the steel
becomes very hot, because you don’t want the result to be contaminated by the
cooling effect. You don’t want it to solidify. So you have to keep putting it in. So
you push it into the lava, you walk down the lava for as far as you can stand it and
then you pull it out. And then you go back again and do that until you think it’s hot
enough to make the measurement. And we got Pilkington’s, the glassmakers in St
Helens, to give us the sort of – we had clothes there which were the same clothes that
people use going into blast furnaces, for the glassmakers, Pilkington’s in St Helens,
and they gave us some of the clothes that would protect you from the heat. So that’s
basically what we did.
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[25:26]
And what was the role of your wives, who were also there with you?
Oh well, they sort of watched and helped and sometimes – I think they went down – I
think they went down into the town a couple of times and left us to it for – I think, if I
remember it right, and they helped. But they also went on walks. Both wives were
keen walkers so they sort of went wandering around.
When they helped what did they do?
Oh, I think they just sort of helped with notes and taking photographs and things like
that, as – so it was, you know, it was really quite – as I said, it was quite a fun period.
What does it feel like to be doing that work that close to a lava flow?
Well, it gets very hot of course and that’s the thing you have to avoid. That’s why we
wore these protective clothes.
And what does it look like on the ground, the lava flow?
Well, it’s just like a stiff sticky liquid. It moves about a centimetre every second so
it’s very sort of creeping. It’s tangibly moving. The flows on Etna move between one
and ten centimetres per second and they move slowly. As I say, it looks slightly like –
it’s obviously a liquid but a very sticky liquid. And it’s sort of incandescent and
obviously quite spectacular at night because it’s sort of red hot and – it’s sort of red
hot liquid essentially that you’re dealing with.
[27:07]
Thank you. And I think you said that the third type of work that you were involved in
at Lancaster involved images of bubbles inside –
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No, it was – what that was, was – we – if you look at any volcanic material, like
pumice or scoria, I mean, you, you know, you – the most obvious thing is it’s
absolutely full of – many volcanic products are just full of bubbles. And so volcanic
eruptions – one of the main effects of a volcanic eruption is for the gas that’s
dissolved under high pressure in the earth to come out of solution. So when the
magma full of gases dissolved deep in the earth comes up to near the surface, you get
foaming or bubbling. So it’s just like opening, you know, a beer or something like
that, the pressure goes down and the bubbles come out as solution and the bubbles
grow. Now of course in a volcano these gases are dissolved under very large pressure
and when they come out they can do so rather violently and one of the products they
produce is pumice, which of course floats as just sort of foamy rock, which volcanoes
produce, which I guess many people know about. But very often the pressures are so
high that the bubbles just rip the liquid apart, it breaks it apart and forms the volcanic
ash. And so that happens during the explosion. And we – and so I wanted to
understand how this process worked and rather like the past, you know, the earlier
one, I – there was very, very little literature on this and nobody had really done very
much work on the physics of bubble growth and nucleation. In other words, you
know, how fast do the bubbles grow, how big do they get, what do they tell us about
the pressure conditions, how can we understand that. So there was almost nothing
around. And so while I was at Lancaster as a – I think I mentioned earlier, this was
the first time I’d – through Lionel, I was sort of introduced to the idea of doing
numerical models to solve equations, which are a bit more complicated than you can,
you know, you couldn’t get an analytical solution. So part of my post doc there, I
looked up the literature on bubble growth. There’s a lot of it in the engineering
literature particularly. I taught myself how people thought bubbles nucleated, how
bubbles grow, and they grow because the pressure goes down. If you get a bubble
under high pressure, when it comes to low pressure it’s got to expand so it grows by
that. And then it grows by what people call diffusion of – gas dissolved into liquid
has to – the gas molecules have to move into the – out of the liquid into the bubble
and by moving into the bubble the bubble grows. So it’s exactly what you see when
you open, you know, a fizzy drink or something, that’s when the bubbles grow. And
we also know that you can get catastrophic flows through bubble growth. And in fact
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anyone who wants to do this can get a bottle of lemonade, fizzy lemonade, pour a
little bit – half of it out and drop a teaspoon of sugar in, and then it’ll have a jet which
will go up two or three metres, because the sugar triggers the catastrophic growth of
bubbles. So these are all the things I wanted to understand. So I read up a lot of
engineering literature. I mean, I remember reading papers on the bends, you know,
bubble growth – when people go diving, they get the bends because bubbles grow in
their blood. So I read up some of that literature and I sort of immersed myself in that
literature, got the sort of principles, the sort of physics, and then I wrote a computer
programme, FORTRAN programme, which estimated rates of bubble formation in
volcanic eruptions. So I put in the appropriate numbers, the pressures, the natures of
the gases, the solubility of the gases, all the things which govern how fast bubbles
grow. And I made a computer programme which essentially worked out what the – if
you like, the regimes of bubble growth that might occur in nature and eruptions. And
I published a paper on that on my own, which, as I say, is I think probably my second
highest cited paper, it might be. And because it was the first one to have a go at that, I
sort of found a lot of things that nobody had really thought of before as a
consequence. There were some obvious things – from doing those numerical
calculations, a lot of obvious things emerged, which turned out to be very useful for
understanding the basics of volcanic eruptions.
What sort of things emerged out of the calculations that wouldn’t have done by a non
mathematical –
I think it’s – again, I don’t think – I think it’s like the ones we’ve been describing,
because you can’t really just do a numerical model or a model, I don’t think, you
know, without being informed by data or observation. So you’re always seeking to
understand some observations that are made and sort of trying to make sense of them
using the mathematical model. I think that’s how almost all the things I’ve been
involved in have worked. And we knew that bubbles which formed in magmas which
were very viscous and tended to be associated with very explosive volcanoes like
Mount St Helens, tended to form very small bubbles, whereas the sorts of volcanoes
you get in Hawaii, which are – the magma’s much hotter and much more fluid, tend to
produce much bigger bubbles. Okay, well you might think that – it sort of – there
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might be a sort of so whatness about that. I mean, okay, we explain why one type has
big – the model would explain why one had big bubbles and one had little bubbles,
and the nature. But then when the magma gets fragmented or smashed apart in the
explosion, the size of the particles that are produced are determined by – seemed to be
determined by the bubble size. That’s the natural way the things break, you know, the
big bubble – something with a lot of big bubbles will break into big fragments.
Something with a lot of little bubbles tends to break into a lot of small fragments. So
then you realise that for a more – again, this is an impact point. None of this work
was done in any way related to impact. But what’s important in forecasting volcanic
ash over Britain is what’s the size of the particles that are produced, and to understand
the size of the particles you have to know about the bubbles. So I think that’s the
principles of it. It also relates, but not in a very simple way that I can easily explain,
but the other fundamental thing in volcanoes is we get lava flows, which sort of flow
harmlessly down the volcano, and we get explosions and the one thing that – I don’t
think was really known so well then but we do understand very well now, is the
magma which forms the lavas originally had the same amount of gas in it as the
magma that formed explosions, you know. So a simple explanation is that if a
volcano explodes, the magma has a lot of gas in it. If it doesn’t explode and produces
a lava, it didn’t have much gas. That’s the obvious explanation and it was sort of the
explanation that people had in the sort of, I would say, ‘60s, even into the ‘70s. That
turns out to be completely wrong. The magmas which form the harmless lava also
originally had a lot of gas in, so the problem now becomes not of saying one’s gas
rich and one’s gas poor. The problem comes, why did the – how did the gas escape
from one magma so that it can come out harmlessly as a lava. So in other words, the
gas comes out slowly and it never produces pressures big enough for an explosion and
in other cases it does. So the question changes. And to understand that, why you get
lavas sometimes and why you get explosions other times, you really need to
understand actually in some detail how these bubbles interact with each other. And so
this led on – I mean, again, this is not the research I did then but it led onto a lot of
research, not done by me but done by many others subsequently, which really tried to
understand how these bubbles interact. And the work I did at Lancaster I think was a
sort of starting point for that sort of field of understanding, you know, what gases do
in volcanoes.
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[37:33]
Thank you. You mentioned that your wife came with you to Etna. How would you –
how did you meet and when did you meet?
Oh right, well that’s – ah, yeah, that’s going back a long way because we’ve been
married a long time. We met when I went up to see my father in Birkenhead, when
he’d just married his second wife, and she was a teacher at a Catholic teacher training
college in London, quite close to Imperial College, called Maria Assumpta. And she
– we just were – she lived on the Wirral in a place called Heswall, quite close to
Birkenhead, and we just were travelling on the same train and then we met on Lime
Street Station, so our, you know, sort of famous pickup point in Liverpool. And so
we met on Lime Street Station and sort of, you know, our – I didn’t know the area
very well so I asked her to show me to Birkenhead and so that was – [laughs] that was
how we were introduced.
And how did that relationship develop towards getting married? You know, how and
when did you see each other?
Well, we were both students in London so it was all this sort of, as I say, about 1970,
and then we got married in 1971. So we’ve been married, you know, quite a long
time.
And she was working as a teacher while you were –
She was a teacher – yes, teacher training and then she started doing teaching in
London, so we – so yeah, that’s how – yeah, and of course obviously we were married
by the time I did my PhD.
[39:18]
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Thank you. And at the end of the Lancaster appointment, what decisions did you
make then about what to do next? What were the options, as it were?
Well, it was serendipity because a well known geological oceanographer called
Norman Watkins, a larger than life character, was a professor at the Graduate School
of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. So Norman knew about George
and knew he produced PhD students and Norman did a – organised for – got funding
from NSF to take the URI research vessel, called the Trident, out to the Eastern
Mediterranean. And he contacted George and George said, Steve’s done a [PhD on
Santorini] – and the idea of his expedition, I should have said, was to trace out the ash
from the great Bronze Age eruption of Santorini. So Norman contacted George, I
think in the first instance, and then George said, well – I’m not sure whether – I’m not
actually sure quite how that link came up because we’d also published our paper, so it
could be that Norman – Norman worked with George and he’d perhaps also seen our
paper. Anyway, he contacted me and said, well, firstly would you like to come on our
cruise to the Eastern Mediterranean, and secondly, how about coming over to Rhode
Island for a post doc. And so I applied for a NATO fellowship, they did NATO
fellowships, and I got that to go to Rhode Island and then I went on the cruise with
Norman. And we went, taking sediment cores round the Mediterranean and picked up
the volcanic ash. And that led me to go into, you know, spend two years in Rhode
Island, the School of Oceanography.
The – could you describe the process of taking sediment cores on this?
Yeah, the process of sediment cores is – it comes back to sort of steel barrels again a
bit. You basically have a steel pipe, you have a great big weight on it, at the top of it
– so imagine a steel pipe and you imagine a sort of – big weights, almost like sort of
weight lifters weights, on the top. And you plunge this pipe with – it has an inner
liner of plastic that you push up it to take the sediment. So what you do is you plunge
this instrument onto the seafloor, the tube basically pushes into the sediment and takes
a core of – it takes a core of sediment. But that sort of brute force – you find when
you do that that the core won’t go in more than a metre or two if you’re lucky. So you
don’t get very far with that. So a piston corer is something with a piston at the bottom
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of the tube so that the piston is – and then it’s on a bit of steel cable, which is attached
to a trigger. And what it’s designed to do is the moment the tube touches the seafloor,
the trigger is pressed and as the steel tube goes into the sediment, the piston goes up
and in principle it stays exactly – it’s designed to stay exactly at the seafloor. So it’s
like a vacuum and it sucks the sediment up into the tube. And so this way you can get
four or five or six metres of core and you can go back 100 or 200,000 years of ocean
history by doing that. And that’s what we did. So we went round – and it takes four
or five hours to take a single core and you’re – you do work – the boat works night
and day and we collected about thirty cores.
[43:25]
And what did you come to know about the sort of – I can see the aims of the work but
the reasons for doing it at that time? Why was this work happening here?
Well, I think the reason was that scientifically the whole idea of a giant eruption
extinguishing a whole civilisation in the Bronze Age, which was around at the time,
and then the sort of rather much more speculative and romantic notion that Santorini
might have been Atlantis and there were books written about this. So it was a very
popular science topic. And then the discovery of the Minoan – late Minoan
civilisation, the town of Akrotiri buried beneath the ash was a sort of Greek Pompeii.
So there was a sort of – I suppose sort of romance and popular science aspect of it.
And the – it was a sort of – linked a little bit with the very early ideas that a big
volcanic eruption could affect climate. These ideas were beginning to be talked
about, that it might have a huge environment impact. And so this was really
interesting. And so the idea was to find out how far the ash had gone, how big the
eruption was, by taking these sediment samples from the seafloor. So that’s really I
think the rationale for it.
[44:59]
And how did you find – you then went back to – you then moved to America for two
years.
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We lived in Rhode Island for two years, yes.
How would you describe the sort of society and culture of American science in
relation to your experience of science in Britain at that time?
It was very different. I was younger than most of the PhD students who were around
me, because they spend much longer doing their PhDs. So even though I’d done two
years post doc, there were some old hands there. And, you know, the – but of course,
you know, in general, I think, like a lot of people who go to the United States, it’s an
extremely dynamic country in many ways, very different in all sorts of ways, but as a
young student it’s tremendous really. I mean, you’re exposed to a lot of new – and of
course going to an oceanography institute, which – I didn’t know very much about
oceanography before, so being involved in more oceanographic science was really
very interesting. And so I really enjoyed, you know, so I was being exposed to new
sorts of science and new sorts of questions, still around volcanology obviously. And
we – Rhode Island is a very nice place to live, so we …
Were there any differences in the way that scientists dressed or spoke to each other in
the US as opposed to Britain?
I mean, I – it’s difficult to answer that question without a lot of, you know, forward
knowledge about, you know, I’ve spent a lot of time in the United States so I know
the scientific culture and I’m not sure I could answer that as a sort of young scientist
being there for the first time. I mean, I could answer the question in a much more
general way.
Mm, perhaps we’ll look at that tomorrow maybe.
Yeah. I mean, I think – I did find it an exciting place to be scientifically. I again
made a couple of very major collaborators, an Icelander called Haraldur Sigurðsson,
who was at Rhode Island, a famous volcanologist from Iceland, and Steven Carey,
who his PhD student, who is now a sort of eminent sort of geological oceanographer,
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still there. And I made those two links. I mean, actually Norman – poor old Norman
died of cancer within a few months of me getting there, so I never really interacted
with him. It was – and there was a brief three month period where Norman was well,
three or four months, when I sort of did get to know him a bit and quite a few of his
students, and that was very interesting. I mean, I’d heard some of the sort of more
sort of puerile aspects of science in a sense, that, you know – well, one could make of
this what one likes. I mean, Norman loved the fact that he and his student group in
Rhode Island had more abstracts for the big American conference [American
Geophysical Union] that takes place once a year and so he would sort of come into the
lab and say, ‘Look at this, we’ve got ten abstracts and I’m co-author on seven of
them’ [laughs] ‘And nobody else in America’s got this.’ So I suppose that was sort of
slightly trivial but it sort of – that would be different for Britain. I mean, that would
be sort of the competitiveness that you get in the – it’s a sort of, you know, sort of
manifestation I suppose of sort of competitiveness. And Norman also loved the idea
that he and his students would publish in different journals, so they sort of collected
journals that they’d published in, like almost like a sort of collection that you’d, you
know, you wanted a paper in this journal or that journal. So you learnt a lot about the
sort of competitiveness in American science. And then, as I say, it was a – they’re,
you know, very dynamic. They, you know, they – in a British institution you all go
for coffee or tea, but they tend to sort of get their coffee and go into their [laughs] –
go into their desk and carry on working and things. It is different.
[49:40]
And what did you do with the – I mean, in practice and in detail, what did you do with
the cores now that you’d brought them back to Rhode Island? What I think people
would find it hard to understand is how on earth you identify ash from an ancient
volcano in a core of sediment on the –
It’s very, very easy because the sediment on the bottom of the Mediterranean is mud
and silt. The ash is different in colour and even under a little magnifying glass you
can see that the magma represents smashed up foam. And so the particles are shaped.
So if you imagine a collection of bubbles and you broke that up, you’d get some very
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peculiar shapes because the liquid in between would have sort of carved and pointed
features and edges, which would be very distinctive. And so you basically saw that
this was smashed up bubbles and that – you can tell that instantly by looking at a –
with a magnifying glass, so it’s actually very easy. And then furthermore, you can tell
which volcano it is because each volcano produces magmas which have just slightly
different chemistry or minerals and you can measure – using an electron microscope
and analysis, you can measure the chemical composition of the volcanic ash particle
and you can say, well, that ash is from Santorini and this ash is from Vesuvius, or
wherever. So it’s fairly easy to do that.
And how in practice did you do that, where and how?
Well, in Rhode Island they have a core repository, so you – on the boat you’ve got the
core, you split it along its length. You do some basic measurements on the boat. You
take it back, you put it in essentially a freezer to keep – preserve the – stop it drying
out, wrap it in cellophane and then when you want to study it you open it up and you
see – in the long, you know, tube that you’ve got, half of a tube, you see the layers of
mud and you see the layers of sediment and you see the dark layers where the whole
Mediterranean went stagnant for a period and you see all the history of the
Mediterranean laid out in the core. And then of course you just take small samples
and do whatever analyses you want to do on them.
And what did it show about the size of the eruption?
Well, it sort of confirmed what we thought, which was that it was a jolly big eruption,
which wasn’t too surprising. But we were able to quantify that, which is a start. It led
to some work of a more subtle kind, which told us a lot about the mechanism of the
eruption. And it really relates back to this sort of earlier work I talked about, that we
could look at things like the grain size distribution of the deposit and we could make
inferences about the nature of the activity that went on in the volcano. Now I, during
my PhD, had already done work near the volcano and that gives you a lot of
information to reconstruct what had happened. But you – the ash that goes a long way
and you find on the seafloor gives you a different sort of information, so you can add
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a bit more of the jigsaw puzzle to working out what happened in the eruption. I don’t
think that work in itself led to anything sort of – a dramatic science breakthrough or
anything, but it was part of a wider picture of understanding these big eruptions and
understanding the, you know, the processes that go on. And it did lead to something,
which was – it was a little bit of a nugget or bit of a picture of a jigsaw puzzle, which
ultimately led to a much bigger idea, which is that when you get these giant flows
they generate – the flows themselves generate giant amounts of very fine ash and
these ash layers can become suddenly buoyant in the atmosphere and lift off in
altitude, dramatic, almost lofting. If you imagine an area that’s been covered by hot
volcanic ash by a flow measuring, say, thirty by thirty or fifty by fifty kilometres,
thousands of square kilometres, and you imagine all of that area becoming suddenly
lighter than the atmosphere above it, then the whole thing can lift off, huge amounts
of fine ash, and inject into the stratosphere as a huge cloud, which covers, you know,
areas the size of the eastern Mediterranean. And that was a discovery which we really
made much later, but this was a little, you know, this was one of these little clues that
later on you would put together with other clues and you would then come up with a
sort of – something which is a really significant new idea.
Because this is how this ash that you were finding in the cores had got there?
That’s right, yeah. Now we didn’t realise that at the time, you know. This idea
wasn’t produced at the time, it was produced much later, but it always, you know, it’s
– these things – things you observe, which you don’t think necessarily are – you don’t
really know whether they’re important or not, turn out to be very significant when you
put it together with a bit of other evidence that might be five or ten or fifteen years
later and then you put them together and then you find something new out of that.
[End of Track 2]
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Track 3
Just on things that you told me last time about your early life, I wondered whether
you’d have any comments on the effect on yourself of the death of your mother at the
time and then sort of in reflection, as you look back on your life now, the two things.
Yes, I – I mean, of course I often wondered about that. I mean, I think the – I mean,
one of the things that – and I think this was – as I mentioned, because I think she was
ill for several years, sort of mental illness, and in and out of hospital, and so I didn’t
really know her very well. I think that’s one thing obviously one sort of regrets. It’s
hard to know what the effect would have been … as I say, I was definitely a slow
starter and didn’t really sort of show an awful lot of promise in things until I got really
into secondary school when I was about thirteen or fourteen, so a little bit later. So
I’m sure it must have had a very strong effect. I think it’s hard to know – it’s hard for
me to sort of assess what that really was. I mean, I – as I say, I was effectively
brought up in a sort of bachelor household and I must say, I don’t really have a huge
amount – my brother remembers things about her much better than I do, ‘cause he’s
eight years older.
Do you remember the effect of her death on your father or on your brother?
Oh yes. I mean, he was obviously highly traumatised by it and, you know, a lot of the
sort of family came and helped and we – I remember going up to the sort of
internment of her ashes up in Scotland. So she’s buried in a place called Kilcreggan,
which looks over the Clyde. And that’s – I think that was because my father was
stationed there in the Ack-Ack defending Glasgow against the Luftwaffe and I think
that’s – I think from what I understand, that was the sort of – one of the sort of
happier times in their lives when they were up in Glasgow. And that’s when they
adopted my older brother, who’s a Scot – who’s actually, you know, sort of a Scot.
He came from – his – they adopted him from – what’s – is it Dunoon, on the Clyde?
So I think – and so they had – so I do remember going up, you know, for the funeral
and the internment of the ashes and things. And, you know, and her twin sister
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coming along and my cousin and so forth. So yes, I mean, it undoubtedly must have
had a big effect.
[2:49]
You mentioned your father serving in the war there. Could you just say something
more generally about what he did?
Yes, he was a captain in the Ack-Ack. So in the first part of the war, when he was,
you know, sort of a commissioner, he became an officer, he became a captain, and I
think his first station – and learned to, you know, do the Ack-Ack guns in the artillery.
And he was stationed in Glasgow, I think from probably sometime in early ’42 to end
of – near the end of ’43. So I think he was up there for at least two years. And, as I
say, they were trying to defend Glasgow against the Luftwaffe. And then he went to –
he went to India for the rest of the war. I think he must have gone over early in ’44,
or late ’43, to when the Japanese were – they’d invaded Burma and there was a threat
that they’d invade India. And so he went out as part of the British Army to, you
know, sort of – to defend India. So that’s how he got out then, stationed in Bombay,
or Mumbai now. And so that was the war. Then he sort of left the army of course as
soon as the war finished.
[4:12]
Thank you. We’ll go back to the University of Rhode Island. We’d discussed some of
your work there but there was another significant piece of work that you did there
with someone called Sigurðsson, am I saying that –
Yes, Haraldur Sigurðsson, an Icelandic volcanologist. And, as I say, the chap
Norman Watkins died a few months after I arrived, so he was the person I was really
supposed to be working with. But then I started working with Haraldur and we did a
lot of really interesting things. We went on another cruise to the West Indies and took
a lot more cores of volcanic ash. And we went to Iceland together and did some
studies there. So we did quite a lot of interesting science. I think the one I would pick
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out, because it sort of then led onto something that happened later, is that during that
we got interested in why it was that when you went out to the mid ocean ridges of the
earth and you looked at the basalts that had erupted, they all seemed to have a rather
similar composition. So as you probably now, where tectonic plates are constructed,
the plates pull apart and the hot mantle comes up and as it comes up the change in
pressure makes the mantle melt. And then we get volcanoes where the plates are
pulled apart on the seafloor and these erupt and form lava flows. And one of the
observations was that almost none of these lavas could have been directly taken from
the Earth’s mantle. In other words, we knew that that’s where they were being – these
magmas were being formed, by melting the Earth’s mantle, but something was
happening in them between being formed and then getting to the Earth’s surface. You
never saw the original melts, magmas getting to the earth’s surface. And this really
relates to big questions of how the earth chemically differentiates and how the
magmas beneath volcanoes behave. You know, all volcanoes have underneath them
storage regions of molten rock magma, which is sort of there before an eruption and
then this is the source of the eruption. And so this led us – this was an interesting
area. And I thought that – because my interests had been in – started to get into fluid
mechanics and I’d been thinking about plumes in the atmosphere, I started to think
about the idea that underneath the mid ocean ridges you would have this volcano and
then you’d have these storage regions. And so the mantle – the magma that was
created in the mantle and came up from much greater depth would have to pass
through these bodies of magma first. And I started to think, well, these magmas have
different densities, fluids with different densities, and if the magma coming in is
heavier than the magma in the chamber it might do one thing. So in other words if
you’ve got a heavy fluid it will tend to flow under – just like the volcanoes I was
describing before. When you have something which is dense in the atmosphere it’ll
flow along the ground in the same way a magma that comes into a magma chamber
will flow along the bottom of it and will never erupt. Whereas if it comes in and it’s
lighter it’ll mix – it’ll form a plume. And I started to look at the fluid mechanics,
applying in a way some of the same principles that I’d applied to volcanic eruptions in
the atmosphere, but because these are much – magmas are much stickier than, you
know, more viscous, stickier than the atmosphere, it’s different in detail. And I was
able to show that it was very likely a simple fluid mechanical screening which
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prevented the deeper magmas directly from the mantle, from ever erupting, or very
rarely erupting. And so I used fluid mechanical principles and I worked with
Haraldur. We collated data from the ocean ridges and we published a paper, which
we were – yeah, was really quite pleased with. It’s an interesting example of how –
the progress of science, you often find that people think of the same idea almost at the
same time but don’t know each other. And we were sort of – we’d got our paper
[with Adrienne Bond] sort of accepted and a colleague of ours from Harvard, a
professor at Harvard, came in and sort of – to visit Haraldur and myself to talk about
things. And we had our diagrams on the table and he was sort of like this [laughs],
because he and another guy, another famous petrologist, a chap called Ed Stolper, had
published a very similar idea but not – but it was – in detail it was rather different to
ours. So they went and published their paper anyway. But it was almost the sort of
two groups of scientists independently coming to the same – broadly to the same idea,
but we just pipped them to the post of course, which was [laughs] – the sort of
competitive element of science is always sort of something one – that happens. So
yeah, so that was – now the reason for – I mean, I think it was a nice bit of work and it
was really quite influential at the time.
[10:08]
Also I published with Haraldur and Lionel Wilson another idea, which has proved –
which last - lasted with time, is that big explosive eruptions, like the ones in Santorini,
could be also triggered by a magma chamber sitting underneath a volcano and then
some very hot new magma coming in from much greater depth and stirring it all up
and destabilising it and making it erupt. And so we came up with this idea that many
volcanic – big explosive eruptions are triggered by what we call recharge. In other
words, the magma chamber’s just sitting there underneath the volcano, not doing very
much, and to get it to erupt you need a sort of boost of new magma from – hot magma
from depth. And we came up with that idea and published that in Nature and that’s
turned out to be – I think lasted the – again, that idea has been demonstrated in
countless volcanoes ever since, that that model often works [Note: I recently have
done research which indicates these ideas are not quite right.]
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[11:12]
At this time, how did you – or what observations were necessary to determine that the
melt that was coming out of the mid ocean ridge wasn’t in character the same as
mantle material? How did you know that?
How do you know that, yes. Well, there’d been a lot of excellent work in the field
that was called experimental petrology. So you would take bits of the mantle and you
do experiments in different pressures and temperatures and you look at the
compositions of the melts that are formed. And one very prominent feature is that
when you melt the mantle, the ratio of magnesium to iron has certain values and
they’re constrained by the mantle composition. You can’t get values which are very
different from these values. And when a magma – you take a magma like that and
then it either cools or mixes – or degasses or something and it starts to crystallise, the
ratio of magnesium to iron changes. So you can tell magmas which have been
somewhere, stopped, cooled and crystallised, they’ve changed their magnesium – the
ratio of magnesium to iron. And then when they erupt of course they’ve got this
different value. So almost all the lavas that erupt in Iceland or in the mid ocean ridge
have this character, this magnesium iron ratio, which is essentially impossible to get
by melting the mantle. So you just could tell from the simple chemistry that they’d –
something had happened to them, they’d changed. And the really – what we call
primitive or the original material just hadn’t got through. So that’s how we did it.
And the other idea, the explosive – the triggering of the explosive eruption was again
simple – in this case it was simple field observations. We went and looked at the
deposits, volcanic deposits, from eruptions like the Bronze Age and when we looked
at the pumice we saw these little dark bits in them, mixed in. And we found that they
were pervasively mixed with very tiny amounts of a different sort of magma, a hotter
magma. And these were little dark blebs. And we just saw these all over the place.
And when we looked at them we found that they were essentially magma which had
come from much greater depth, much hotter, and that they’d been pervasively stirred.
You know, every lump of pumice you took, every other lump of pumice, would have
perhaps one of these little blebs in. So we made the deduction that the magma – the
observation suggested this hotter magma had come in and then it had been stirred
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pervasively, you know, like sort of stirring sultanas into some porridge almost. It had
been thoroughly stirred. And then we could tell by looking at the – some of the
minerals and, without going into details, we could tell that that had happened very
soon before the eruption. It couldn’t have happened a long time before the eruption or
the minerals would have changed or we’d have seen different things in the minerals of
the rocks. So we could also say that this mixing event had happened just before the
eruption. So it was observation in the field of these little blobs and then looking at
some of the sort of simple mineralogy and chemistry when we got back in the lab.
[15:09]
Yes, what did you do – if we could sort of look at you, both of you, in the lab working
at that time on that problem, what would we actually see you doing? ‘Cause
sometimes it’s a little bit mysterious for people, knowing what the work of science is.
So what did you – having made these observations in the field, what are you then
doing back at the office or in a laboratory?
Yes, that’s right. You’re – well, in this case – in fact both the bits of science I’ve
described, we would use something called an electron microprobe. It’s a very
standard instrument these days. It was still – it had become standard by that time as a
way of analysing minerals. And essentially it’s a very high voltage beam of electrons,
which you could take – just like I described yesterday, you slice the rock until it’s
almost transparent, into what we call the thin section. You then polish one side of this
thin section so – and you cover it in a very thin coat of carbon so that the – if you like,
the electrons – the current is transferred. And you have this beam of electrons that
hits a very tiny area in the mineral, or in the volcanic glass, and when it hits it at very
high energy you get characteristic x-rays given off of the different elements that
compose the mineral. So if the mineral’s got a lot of magnesium or silica then you’ll
get – the bombardments by the electrons will give off the x-rays that are characteristic
of those two elements. And then of course you look at a spectral – essentially you
analyse the spectra and you find out what the proportions of silica and magnesium
must be. And then if it’s – there’s quite a lot of different minerals, which all contain
magnesium and silica, silicon, but their proportions are different. So you can then tell
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from the proportions which of the minerals it might be. You actually – generally
actually already know from looking at the optical properties what the mineral is, so
this is not as much of an identification tool as a tool to do some sort of quantitative
analysis of the material. And so then once you’ve got, you know what the mineral
composition is, you can then look at people’s experiments where they’ve found out
that you only form this mineral at this temperature or this pressure, you can then say,
well, my rock’s got this particular mineral in with this particular composition and
therefore I know it must have been erupted about 1,200 degrees centigrade, or it must
have been crystallised at a pressure less than three or four – the equivalent of three or
four kilometres depth. So I can then make some sort of proper quantitative statements
about it. And then if I know that the minerals should have – it’s out of chemical
equilibrium with its environment, it’s a mineral which shouldn’t – it’s like sort of
having ice in hot water, it should really dissolve, and then I find that in a rock where it
should have dissolved, there was enough time, then I can make some deductions
about, you know, how long that mineral could have been there before it erupted. So,
you know, if you had a glass of hot water and you chucked an ice cube in, you’re
going to say, well, that’s not going to last more than ten or fifteen minutes and it’s all
going to be dissolved. So if you – if you see a glass of water with a lump of ice in
then you know you’ve – and you knew the temperature of the water then you’re going
to know that that ice cube was, you know, if you went into a room and you saw the ice
cube dissolving away you would know it could only have been put in there ten or
fifteen minutes before. And that’s really the logic we use to work out that these
eruptions were triggered, you know, were triggered by these bursts of new magma
from depth.
[19:21]
Thank you. What was your wife doing while you were – presumably she came with
you to –
To Rhode Island.
What did she do whilst you were there?
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She was a teacher and she did – she did some sort of local volunteer work in schools.
She wasn’t allowed to work unfortunately. We started a family. Our first son was
born in the USA, towards the end, so that took up time. We were there for two years
and we very much liked the place. We made an awful lot of friends outside academia
and we went back there – because of the connection, we went back there a lot. In fact
probably the next ten years we went back almost every summer to Rhode Island and
sort of kept our friendships up there. And in fact about five years ago we bought a
house there, so we’ve currently got a house in Rhode Island, a small house we use for
summer vacations and rent it in the winter so that we can keep up contact. So we
really like the area.
What was the effect of having children on the way you worked or the amount of work
you would do or the timings of your days, that sort of thing?
Oh, I think that does change things a lot. I mean, our first child was born towards the
end of our trip in Rhode Island, so – I think with about three – he was born about
three months before we – two or three months before we left for Cambridge. And of
course that does change things quite a lot [laughs] in terms of the things you do and
the sort of lifestyle and things inevitably. I mean, it didn’t – as I say, he was really
born just before we left, so it didn’t really affect, you know, that when we were in the
United States, except that we were – a lot of – at least three of our very close friends
there who are not academics at all, families, were people who were also bringing up
young families at the time, so that’s how we sort of got to know them.
[21:31]
Ah, I see, yes. What specific memories do you have of things done sort of outside of
work at Rhode Island over these two years?
Oh, I think, because I’m – at the time I was a sort of big sports – I’ve always been a
big sports fan and played sport, and soccer in particular, so I joined a group of Irish
Americans, who called themselves the Jamestown Shamrocks, and they played in the
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Rhode Island Soccer League. So I played a lot of, you know, at the weekends I’d play
for the Shamrocks. And that was great – very interesting because the, you know, it
gave you great insight into the history of America because we would play in places
like Providence, where a lot of Italians and Portuguese communities are, and so you’d
play teams of Portuguese Americans and Italian Americans and so very different sort
of cultures. And the odd fight would break out [laughs] in the matches sometimes.
So it was – that was great fun. And so I played soccer. You know, a lot of our –
Southern Rhode Island is on Narragansett Bay, which is the heart of, you know,
American sailing, so we – there was the Americas Cup there and some of our friends
had yachts so we’d – I didn’t sail myself but we’d go out with friends on sailboats. Of
course we sort of just about got there, 1976, for the bicentenary, you know, July 4th
celebrations, which was – I remember being great fun, with huge firework displays
and things. So it was a very nice part of – as I say, recreation, a very nice part of the
world. So those are the sorts of things I remember from the – yeah, from the time.
[23:26]
Thank you. Could you tell the story of the move back to the UK, including reasons
why you went back to Cambridge rather than anywhere else? What happened?
Well, obviously when you’re on these short post docs, like a lot of young scientists
find these days, you sort of – almost as soon as you’ve got the post doc you’re sort of
starting to think, what next. And I – there was a possibility – in fact, as I mentioned
earlier, I went back there almost every year for almost ten years and that was always
supported by NSF grants that my Rhode Island colleagues wrote and they wrote in
some money for me to, you know, for travel and a bit of accommodation. So I think
the initial plan might have been to have submitted an NSF grant with Haraldur to, you
know, to work on something in – so, you know, one wouldn’t know whether that
would work out or not. But Cambridge University advertised for what they called a
demonstrator. I’m not sure whether they still have these posts there but they’re sort of
junior – I suppose junior lectureships, but fixed term contracts. And I applied for one
of those, got interviewed in – in a rather interesting way because – I think they had
four people up for interview at Cambridge for this job, me being one of them, and we
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– but Ron Oxburgh, who was just about to go from Oxford to Cambridge at the time,
to become head of department – I actually went to Oxford and then Ron took me and
another candidate across to Cambridge and I’m sure he was actually interviewing us
both [laughs] in practice, although he’s, you know, of course he would have done it
very subtly. But – and then we went to Cambridge and did the – did the usual thing of
doing a talk and getting interviewed and then I was offered the job, so that led to
going to Cambridge.
[25:38]
What were your impressions of Ron Oxburgh? Was this the first time that you’d met
him?
I’m sure I must have met him before but I didn’t know him very well so it was sort of
the first time I’d really sort of come across Ron in detail. And of course he was a sort
of – at the time he – and of course still is, a sort of giant of earth science. And he’d
just got the Cambridge job and his sort of mission was to, you know, bring it up to
speed, as it were. And he, you know, he’s an extremely impressive figure. And so,
you know, I’ve always enjoyed talking to Ron. He always talks, you know, has a, you
know, sort of very common sense – view of science and the world. And of course
seeing him operating, sort of transforming the Cambridge earth science department at
the time was sort of a fascinating lesson of how, you know, if you like, to – how
leadership should work; so a very impressive figure. And, as I say, I’ve always
enjoyed his company.
What was the – are you able to say something about the nature of your own sort of
ambition at the time? What – at this time, as a fairly young scientist, what were you
sort of hoping for for the future? What were you aiming at? What was the sort of
nature of your ambition, if you were ambitious?
I think – it’s interesting. I’m sure I was subliminally ambitious, I’m sure. I don’t
really remember – my recollection was that it sort of – that sort of thing never really
quite occurred to me, because in a way the various jobs and positions I got sort of fell
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– just came about at the right time, so I didn’t really have to do an awful lot of
thinking or worrying about what the long term, you know, as I said, I was sort of
toying with the idea of writing an NSF grant or being on an NSF grant on soft money
in the United States and making my way that way, but then this job came up and I just
applied and got it, so that was all very straightforward. So I never really, you know,
and I think at that age – it was a five years appointment, seemed a very long time.
And so I’m not sure it ever occurred to me. Indeed, I was with a colleague, a very
famous colleague, when I took my sabbatical in CALTECH in ’87, 1987, where he
was sort of – we were chatting and he just asked me what my sort of career plan was,
you know, sort of – and he’d obviously sort of thought out a sort of carefully staged
plan. And I guess the question never really occurred to me at the time. I mean, I was
enjoying the science, things seemed to be falling into place, you know, fairly easily in
some respects. So I just went to Cambridge and, you know, obviously had to start
teaching, which I’d not done before, which was a bit alarming, but, you know, that
was also at the time enjoyable. And of course Cambridge is a very special place in all
sorts of ways, so I had to sort of learn a new environment.
[29:09]
Before we go on to look at what you did in Cambridge, could you just say what you
saw of how Ron Oxburgh led this change at Cambridge in the earth sciences?
Yes. I think when he – Ron came there – this is – I mean, this is very much a partial
perception. I mean, at the time they had three departments which were completely
separated, Mineralogy [and] Petrology, Geology, which were next door, and then the
Bullard [Geophysics] out in Madingley, where Dan and co lived, Dan McKenzie and
company lived. And these departments had – I think historically had not worked
together very closely. They did obviously have links but – there was even a time
when the doors between the Mineralogy [and] Petrology, and Geology department
were locked [laughs] back in the sort of – I think at an earlier stage. But the, you
know, it was clear that it didn’t make any sense to have these separate sort of
essentially departments created in the nineteenth century disciplinary views. And
Ron’s – obviously one of his big missions was to merge these three departments into
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one. And of course he did that very effectively and I think he did it – my perception
is he did it by a mixture of consultation but determination when obstacles were put,
you know, put up, well, we’ve always done it this way, sort of thing. And he’s, you
know, he’s a very persuasive personality. He’s very good, I think, at talking to people
and finding out what they want and trying to meet as far as he can their aspirations or
requirements. But at the same time he’s not, you know, he was going to do this
irrespective of anybody who thought they could carry on in the same old way. I’m
sure there were one or two who were sort of very reluctant to go down this path. So I
think that sort of mixture of – that’s what his leadership was. I mean, of course
coming in as a head of department at that time, I think – I don’t know the details. I
suspect he had quite a bit of, you know, Cambridge would probably have said he
could have some resources to help sweeten the change. And so, you know, I
remember him, you know, sort of discussing with the mineralogists that they were
going to get some nice new machine [laughs]. And, you know, I’m sure he didn’t say
this but, you know, the – I’m sure the implication was, you know, if they, you know,
they supported they merger, you know, this would be – one of the benefits for
supporting the merger would be to get these nice new machines and things. And of
course he brought in some new, you know, sort of big name appointments like Keith
O’Nions, obviously he came in at about that time. And so made some strong
appointments, I think. So it was at a stage when people were, you know, a few people
were getting near retirement so he had a lot of opportunity too, I think, to shift the
balance of the department, bring younger people in like myself. And so of course
obviously he created an enormously strong earth science department. I mean, of
course Cambridge always was extremely strong in certain areas and particularly the
geophysics and Bullard had been at the heart of the plate tectonics revolution and
Dewey had been there for a while, John Dewey. So I – so I think – yes, I think he
showed a lot of the sort of key elements of, you know, sort of leadership where you
really need change.
Apart from new staff, what else changed? What else actually changed in terms –
‘cause I know that – I mean, the Bullard Labs still – it’s not as if the Bullard Labs
came into the centre of Cambridge. They remained out there, didn’t they?
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They remained out there, yes.
The door wasn’t locked but – and hadn’t been for a while.
No, still ten minutes to cycle down, isn’t it, yes [laughs].
So how did it become the Department of Earth Sciences as opposed to these three
departments, apart from the fact that certain people left and certain people came?
Were there any other sort of organisational or even geographical changes that –
No, there were no real geographical changes. I mean, I think it was obviously much
easier to unite the Mineralogy [and] Petrology and Geology departments because they
sit next door to each other and effectively they just become one department and
everybody has tea and – I think interacting with the Bullard was always going to be a
little more of a challenge in the sense that of course they were already the preeminent
– really the strongest part. I mean, there were the sort of great palaeontologists of
course at Cambridge at the time and other people, but you could say with all the plate
tectonics, the Bullard was the preeminent bit of the earth sciences. But I think – I
mean, my recollection is that it was done – it wasn’t done in some sort of dramatic
way, it was sort of very incremental and the two departments just sort of gradually
fused – the three departments gradually fused together. And there was an effort,
certainly from Bullard people, to come down to have tea in the Downing site. I
remember Dan would – made a particular – Dan McKenzie made a particular point of
coming down to the Downing site and, you know, was having tea with people and
talking to people. So I think there was quite a big effort there. And now of course it
is – very few – I think James Jackson is now the head of department at Cambridge,
from the, you know, he’s sort of a Bullard person. So I think it happened in a sort of
gradual way, but there’s always going to be an issue when you’ve got two sites. I
mean, that’s inescapable that there’s going to be – communication issues are always
going to be there and have to be addressed. It’s not going to be something you solve
and then you don’t have to worry about. He [Ron Oxburgh] also had a wonderful –
he made a wonderful appointment of an administrator called Margaret Johnson, who
ran the department on the administrative side. And Margaret was a sort of –
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tremendously well organised and she really played a huge role in bringing that
department together and – she’s since retired but she was a – she played a big role as
an administrator.
In what way? What was significant about what she did?
I think she just ran, you know, she ran all the sort of administrative organisational
aspects of the departments, the things that might – some things which might have
perhaps in other places been the responsibility of the head of department. Ron felt
very confident at being able to delegate to her and he could sort of spend more of his
time looking at sort of bigger strategic issues. I would say that that was, you know,
she ran the administrative office and the technical staff and the, you know, who gets
what room and how the, you know, and so forth. So it’s all the admin aspects which
underpin how a department works.
[36:51]
Could you then tell me about colleagues at Cambridge and how your research
developed there in relation to a sort of new group of people?
Yes. I mean, it was again like going to all the previous places, you start interacting
with people you didn’t know before. But I think I – my interaction was very much
with one particular person, Herbert Huppert. And because of my starting to get
interested in the fluid mechanics of magma chambers, I realised that some of this
convection theory and fluid mechanics was really pretty difficult – it involved quite
complex mathematics, which was well beyond my, you know, sort of capability or
knowledge. But I knew I had to get to grips with this maths in some way to really
understand the problems I wanted to – was interested in. So I then – I went down to
see Herbert Huppert, who was in the DAMTP [Department of Applied Mathematics
and Theoretical Physics], in the applied maths department, and started talking to
Herbert. And Herbert had previously worked on – largely in oceanography on
convection in the ocean and problems like melting ice and so forth and was also a
very good experimentalist, analogue experimentalist, as well as a very fine
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mathematician. And so we started talking and he got interested in the problems I was
interested in and we started to collaborate very strongly together. And so for sort of
almost ten – well, really until I went to Bristol, between ’78 and ’89 we did a
tremendous amount of research together, published a lot of work together. And that
was a highly sort of – I think sort of creative and stimulating time because we sort of
forged ahead in this field and came up with all sorts of interesting stuff. It’s when I
really learnt a lot more about the power of simple laboratory experiments. Herbert
obviously had the high level maths skills to sort out the mathematical aspects of the
things we were interested in and I could provide the geological insights as before. So
we worked together in a very collaborative way and, you know, have written, you
know, literally sort of dozens of papers together over the years.
[39:36]
Could you describe some of the experiments that you did together?
Yes.
To get a sense of what you did together when you were working together.
Yeah. Well, I’ll just go back to the issue I mentioned before, which is when you have
a volcano, we know that many volcanoes have these things called magma chambers
underneath them. These are the sources of the material that erupts. And it goes back
to this idea that I’d already developed in Rhode Island, that the recharge of the magma
chamber – in other words the magma chamber’s sort of sitting there cooling and
crystallising and not doing very much and then we have a deeper surge of deeper
hotter magma come in. And the question is, how do we – if it comes into the
chamber, what happens. So we were able to do a whole series of experiments to
examine the physics of that. We were fortunate at the time very early on to have this
chap called Stuart Turner, a very famous fluid dynamisist from Australia, who – over
in Cambridge, so we – he was a great experimentalist too. And we did a series of
experiments. So in order to test this idea out we had a tank of – a simple tank, a sort
of Perspex tank, sort of measuring perhaps thirty centimetres across and ten
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centimetres deep, maybe thirty centimetres high, so just a box really, a Perspex box.
We would – on the bottom of it we would have a nozzle or a feeder and we’d put in
the tank some sodium nitrate. And when you dissolve sodium nitrate in water it’s
endothermic so it cools down naturally. You just put room temperature water in and
you get cold sodium nitrate. So we then took some potassium nitrate, some hot
potassium nitrate we had in a separate reservoir, and we heated it up and dissolved the
potassium nitrate, but kept it saturated so that even though it was hot it was just about
to start crystallising – making crystals of potassium nitrate. And so what we’d do
would be to inject this very hot – we put some blue dye in it, which made it look quite
spectacular. So we put some blue dye in the potassium nitrate solution and then we’d
feed it through the nozzle into the box containing the sodium nitrate. Now remember
the sodium nitrate is cold and the potassium nitrate is hot, so we’ve got hot
underneath cold but the hot is denser because it’s got – potassium nitrate is denser
than sodium nitrate when you dissolve it. So the potassium nitrate that comes in can’t
actually – flows along the bottom of the tank and forms a separate layer at the bottom.
It stagnates at the bottom. So you can now imagine this sodium nitrate there with no
dye in it and underneath there’s potassium nitrate with blue dye in it. It comes in, it
ponds at the bottom, so it’s like salty water will go the bottom of the ocean, and then
because there’s a heat exchange, there’s convection, the hot potassium nitrate cools
the – heats the sodium nitrate, so that starts to get less dense because it’s been heated
up. And then the potassium nitrate does a very interesting thing, it starts to crystallise
because as it cools the potassium nitrate crystals want to grow. As those crystals
grow it’s taking – it’s changing the chemical composition of the potassium nitrate, the
blue layer, and so it’s getting lighter and lighter because it keeps forming crystals that
you can see growing. And then there’s a point at which the density of the lower layer
becomes equal to and then less dense than the overlying layer and then we get a
catastrophic overturn and the two fluid mixes together. So it’ll be stable for twenty
minutes or half an hour and then this point is reached where you get this catastrophic
overturn and we studied that. That’s an example of the sort of experiment. And we
thought that that was very relevant to what was happening in the ocean ridges,
because what we wanted to do was we want the basalt to come out but it’s got to have
– it can’t be the stuff from the mantle so it has to have crystallised and it has to have
crystallised yet there has to be some mix – we also knew that there would have to
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have been some mixing. So in this very simple experiment we were able to test out
the idea that we had about the mid ocean ridge magma chambers. We were able to
compare Herbert’s theory with the experiments and show that the theory worked. So
we could verify the theory, so it’s a classic piece of science in a sense. And then
because the theory was rather general we could have some confidence in saying, well,
it applies in this little tank but we think it also applies in the large scale of the earth.
And so we were able to then get a lot of insights into how the rocks underneath the
ridges, the mid ocean ridges, formed.
How did that experiment with the tank – I wonder whether you could describe the sort
of – almost the sort of fiddling about that was required to get it to work? Because the
way you described it, it’s almost as if it worked first time like that and perhaps it did.
No. Well, experiments never work first time [laughs], so we always had issues of
finding ways of avoiding experimental issues. And so often doing these sorts of
experiments, you have to play around and it may be weeks or even months before you
can quite get the right conditions or you’ve sorted of worked out how to do it
basically. We had a big advantage because, as I mentioned, Stuart Turner was in
Cambridge on sabbatical around that time, this is sort of right at the beginning of the –
sort of ’79, ’80. And Stuart was actually a great practitioner of these sorts of
experiments and was able to sort of help – he knew, you know, he knew some of the
tricks that would shortcut or, you know, he knew the sort of mistakes you could make,
and so he was helping some of the design of the experiments. So perhaps we didn’t
have as much trouble. But that was always the case, the experiments never sort of
quite worked first time.
And over what sort of timescale is what you’ve described happening, the formation of
the crystals and then the density changing so that it equalises and then the mixing –
The mixing, yeah.
Does all of that happen in an afternoon in this tank or – what is the time –
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It’s usually – I mean, that’s part of the thing, because you want to fix the conditions so
it doesn’t take several days, because the tank is in a cold room and so one
experimental difficulty is that it’s going to lose heat. So if you make it so it’s too
slow you’re going to have a problem because it’ll lose heat by another mechanism and
you don’t want the heat loss to the lab to be an important factor. We in fact had to put
polystyrene round the tank and then only take them off just occasionally so we could
watch what was happening, but we’d sort of try and avoid the heat loss. So that
would be an example of a modification you’d have to do to an experiment. So we
basically designed them so things happened in the order of, you know, a few – several
minutes to perhaps half an hour, an hour. That would be the typical – that’s what
you’d want this to happen in. So you’d design the size of the tank and the
temperatures and things so that you were in the right regime to get a result in a
sensible amount of time.
And how did you record what was happening in a way that you could then present to
other people?
Oh yes. Well, we had little thermistors, temperature measurements, embedded in the
two layers and we would take – with a pipette you could take out samples and
measure the composition of the fluids, so the potassium content to find out how much
potassium nitrate had crystallised. And you could monitor the, you know, with a sort
of chart recorder you could monitor the temperatures of the two layers. So you could
do all that. So fairly simple but, you know, by the time we put thermistors and
samplers and insulation in and worked out how the nozzle should – turn the tap off
and the nozzle on and off to make it work, there’s a nice flow of fluid from another
tank, those are all the sorts of little things which make it a little bit more complicated.
[49:00]
Thank you. Would you be able to describe significant fieldwork during your time at
Cambridge? I don’t know whether you went every summer or every year.
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Yes, I tried to keep in the field as far as I could. I think I did less fieldwork than
perhaps I would have in Rhode Island. But I did, you know, I did still continue to do
field based science. I went to the St Vincent eruption in 1979 on St Vincent and
looked at some of the explosions there and filmed them, you know, for example. I
continued to do work on deep sea cores. I think I did less at that time because I was
very much involved with Herbert in this fluid mechanics area and also I was at the
time doing a fair amount of work on ash core deposits in cores, size. And that – I
think I was still doing fieldwork but then I was teaching and then I was having to go
on field trips with students, so I think I did rather less of my own fieldwork. I started
to take on PhD students of course and that – you start – you then kind of do a different
thing where you’re sort of in a sense advising and managing other people’s research.
And we started a project on Santorini with five successive PhD students, working on
the volcano and working out its entire history. For example, I had people working on
the island of Rum in Scotland, where we saw the remains of one of these magma
chambers that I mentioned before and I had a student working on those up in
Scotland, so sort of relatively easy to go. And of course, you know, go with a PhD
student for a few days or a week, look at the rocks and give them some advice and
then of course they would be doing most of the fieldwork. So I – in a sense Santorini
and Scotland were pretty big in – were pretty big. And then towards the end of – I
had a sabbatical in ANU, Australia National University, where Herbert and I went for
six months, which was great fun. That was in sort of ’82. And I also had a big
expedition – I was involved in a very major expedition to Argentina in 1981, where
we went to a huge volcano right in the remote part of the Andes and I was part of an
expedition led by somebody called Peter Francis from the Open University. And he
was a great sort of expedition guy and he invited me along on that and that was a sort
of very remarkable experience in all sorts of ways. But it was in a very remote part of
the Andes and dealing with one of the biggest volcanoes in the Andes and we mapped
– we did geological mapping and sampling for sort of something like six weeks. And
we – it was a joint – it was a joint Argentine and British Army expedition. There
were the scientists and then there was the Argentine Army, about ten of them, and
another sort of ten or so from the British Army, a corps of engineers, with us. So it
was a major – because it was such a remote area, the army people did all the sort of –
the camps and, you know, sort of the logistical part, and we just went around doing
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the science. So that was – and we finished the expedition and two months later the
Falklands War started, so I think I have a photograph of the last time the British Army
and Argentine Army collaborate. We’ve got our camp with the Argentine flag and the
British flag, the Union Jack, next to each other. So it was just – so we just got out in
time in a sense. So that was great ‘cause we brought back a lot of great material to
work on. So yes, so I carried on doing fieldwork in the Cambridge period but I think
it was significantly less than I probably had done before.
[53:18]
Would you be able to tell the story of that expedition? It seems fascinating, the British
Argentine one.
Yes.
A sort of detailed account of, you know, what happened?
Yes. Well, the – I first met Peter Francis when he was a PhD student at Imperial
College. And when we did this undergraduate expedition – Peter was a great
expedition organiser, he loved organising big expeditions to remote places, and he
was a PhD student at Imperial and he organised an expedition when I was there as an
undergraduate to the Andes. And of course they were the sort of – we met them – I
met him as part of the Imperial College Expedition Society, but of course they were
much grander and sort of, you know, more – they were PhD students and we were
first year undergraduates so, you know, the interaction was quite modest. But then
Peter went on to become the sort of leading volcanologist at the Open University and
still liked doing big expeditions. And he was at the vanguard of the early satellite
data, particularly LANsat, and he was the first person to see this huge structure in the
Andes from satellites. And so this is an absolutely giant volcano with a crater fifty
kilometres long and twenty kilometres wide just sitting in the middle of the high
Andes. And as far as we knew nobody had been there so there was nothing known
about it.
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And this was a sort of form of a volcano, a sort of –
It’s what we call a super volcano. It’s a sort of giant – one of these volcanoes which
has unimaginably large volcanic eruptions. And so Peter invited me to go on the trip.
He did – because he liked organising expeditions, he did most of it [laughs], but he
linked up with the army – he realised the logistics were going to be very considerable
and he raised money from the Royal Geographical Society and other sources, got the
army interested, sort of like adventure training for their guys, and they linked up with
the Argentines, which – to have them along. And we went out there for about six
weeks. And we camped at – we had a main camp at about 4,100 metres altitude and
then we had a – we then went out – ‘cause it’s a huge area, we’d go out, usually on
mules with – we’d split up into groups and we’d usually go out – you couldn’t take a
four wheel drive, you had to go to places by mule. So you – we took out tents and
supplies and went out on the mules, usually with – there were some Argentine – we
had people from the Argentine Geological Survey with us too. And we went out and
went over the place and would camp in one area for two or three days and then come
back to the main camp and sort of went out and covered the whole area that way, in a
reconnaissance way. So we did actually climb the main peak, which eventually –
which was 6,000 – just short of 6,200 metres. We did a traverse over it. And yeah, I
mean, it was a sort of fantastic experience really.
[57:07]
Could you describe the land – I can’t imagine the sort of – not having ever been
anywhere like that, what was the landscape that you were moving through? What did
you see around you while you were –
Yes. Well, the High Andes is a very particular kind of landscape. It’s not like the
Himalayas or the Alps where you’ve got these big rugged mountains, that part of the
world. It’s called the Altiplano. So it’s more like a sort of Tibetan plateau in a way.
It is mountainous of course but the plateau itself is very high, you know, like 3,500,
4,000 metres. And then you’ve got this volcanic, partly older rocks, which are
sticking – mountains which are sticking up, but these mountains are, you know, sort
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of like 1,000 metres or so. And then you’ve got the volcanoes, the volcanic cones,
which can go up to 6,000 metres in places. But then you have the volcano like the
one where we were going, which wasn’t like a sharp peak, it was just a giant
depression actually but at higher altitude with a big sort of mound in the middle of it –
a mountain range in the middle of it. And this mountain range had been pushed up by
magma. And the landscape is very – it’s a very dry part of the world. It’s a sort of
desert really but there are springs and streams running and sort of snow in – there is
some snow in the winter. And so you get springs coming out. And so you get these
what’s called Quebradas - valleys where the water’s coming out and the locals will
have, you know, the more populated areas – this was unpopulated, I should add, but,
you know, in other parts you would see irrigation. In this area you’d just see green,
bright verdant green, in these valleys where the springs and the rivers came out, sort
of fresh water flowing along. But it’s basically a sort of dry landscape. I mean, you
know, if you watch cowboy movies then, you know, the American – I think you’d
think American West, you know, sort of Arizona, that sort of character to the
landscape.
[59:26]
And could you tell me about relations between these different sorts of people? You’ve
got British scientists, including yourself. You’ve got the Argentine Army, you’ve got
the British Army. How did these different kinds of people relate to each other on this
expedition?
I think that it went reasonably well. I can’t really remember anything – major
tensions. I think there was a feeling, whether this is justified or not, amongst the
British soldiers that they were doing all the work and the Argentines were sort of
hanging around more [laughs]. There was definitely that sort of idea that – and I
don’t know how fair that was or not, but I think that – there was an element of that.
There were some, you know, some difficulties. I remember one of the British Army
guys, a sergeant I think it was, who’d come – it was a sort of mixture of squaddies and
a couple of sergeants and about three officers, including a medical officer. And the –
I remember one of the – I’m not sure if it was a sergeant or one of the squaddies, but
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they – it turned out they had agoraphobia, so they got up and this guy wouldn’t come
out of his tent, you know. The open spaces were – he just got completely freaked out.
And so this chap had to be dealt with and he eventually had to leave and go down. I
mean, remarkably he – I met him many years later and he sort of greeted me like a
long lost friend and sort of reminisced about this fantastic time [laughs], but my
recollection of it was that this chap was, you know really had terrible trouble with
that. And then, you know, it was British Army supplies and the odd goat came up
from the villagers, it was transported up occasionally, which was eaten and things. So
I don’t remember huge tensions. As I say, I do remember that. The Argentine
scientists we had in were perfectly fine and we worked together pretty well with them.
Yes, what did you do in this place in terms of scientific work?
It was very much like the sort of work I was describing before, making measurements
of thickness, working out what we call the stratigraphy. There was a number of huge
eruptions from this volcano and so each of them has produced a layer and we wanted
to map out where these layers were, find out how big the eruptions were. We wanted
to collect samples to date them, so we wanted to find out how old this volcano was,
when it last erupted, how long did it last. We eventually found that it was about five
million years and it last erupted two million years ago, so that’s the sort of thing we
discovered. We wanted to look at the mechanisms of the eruptions, so similar to the
sort of previous work I’d done. So we were trying to, yeah, sort of work out what –
how these gigantic eruptions worked.
And what was the nature and extent of the army’s interest in the scientific work?
I think some of them were pretty interested. I remember the doctor, it was a woman
doctor – I think her name, if I recall, was Charlie, and then there was another officer.
They were modestly interested, I mean, not hugely. And of course they had a lot of
things to do because the logistics of the expedition were quite significant. And they
just sort of let us get on with the science and, you know, helped us – were very
helpful, so the expedition was no doubt, you know, was a success because of their
help.
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Did they help directly with the scientific work, collection of –
Yeah, that’s right. I mean, if we’d got lots of samples they’d volunteer to take them.
I mean, we had the mules of course so sometimes they’d just go directly onto the
mules. And they’d help us with, you know, sort of locations and, you know, sort of –
at times, if we needed that. They had sort of – they had communications systems so
… Obviously one of the problems in a remote area is making sure – safety and
making sure people were safe, so they had sort of communications systems that they
brought along. So yeah, they were reasonably interested in what we were doing.
[1:04:08]
Thank you. I think we might be up to the point where you might want to describe the
sabbatical at CALTECH.
Oh, the one at CALTECH, yeah, that came in ’87.
Ah okay.
So that was a little bit later than this.
Yes. So if we then go back to Cambridge, if you could then talk about other work
done at Cambridge at this time?
Yes. I mean, I think – as I mentioned, I went back virtually every summer from
Cambridge to Rhode Island with my family and we’d sort of spend nice summers
working at the School of Oceanography. And there I was working on cores but I was
starting to do some of our own experiments with another colleague called Steve
Carey, who was a close colleague at Rhode Island as well as Haraldur. And so I’d
work with Steve and Haraldur and we started doing experiments. And we did some
nice work there on – looking at how you can tell how intense previous prehistoric
eruptions are by looking at the distribution of the size of the fragments. And I worked
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with Steve on that problem and we – I sort of – by that time – this was about mid
‘80s, I knew enough fluid mechanics that I could sort of do some of this stuff myself
without, you know, at a sort of basic level without necessarily involving Herbert. And
also I’d learnt to design some experiments. So we did actually some nice experiments
in Rhode Island of – about plumes and this problem of rock fragment size. And we
developed a method that’s now very widely used, which is to look at maps of big
fragment size away from volcanoes and then use that information with a physical
model of the eruption column to reconstruct the intensity of past eruptions.
What is a physical model of the eruption column?
It’s very much a fluid mechanical model of a plume rising in the atmosphere and then
spreading out. And so it’s again combining momentum energy, mass conservation
laws, laws of heat exchange, equations of state which describe the material and how
the density – obviously when you’ve got an eruption column which is buoyant, the
key property is the density because that’s the buoyancy. That’s what causes the
plume to rise. So you need an equation of state which tells you what the density is.
And I sort of knew enough about this to create a model which we then used to find out
– if you’ve got a very energetic eruption column, as it rises it starts to widen and
spread in the atmosphere as it rises and starts to – can start to slow down and the
density gets less. So the further up you are in the atmosphere the lower the density of
the air. And so you need – you’ve got a trade off. You’ve got the velocity of the
plume going upwards and you’ve got a big lump of rock. If the full velocity of the
rock is less than the upward velocity of the plume then the rock will go upwards, but
if it gets to a place in the plume where those are exactly balanced then it’ll sort of in
principle roughly stay there. But if it goes to the region of a plume or such a height
that the full velocity of the rock is greater than the upward velocity of the plume then
it’ll start to fall out. And so we mapped out – we did a model which said where rocks
of different size would fall out of the plume and then we predicted what the pattern
would look like on the ground. And then we – having got the pattern, the bigger the
eruption the more – for a rock of a given size, the bigger the eruption the further it
goes, so the pattern depends on the size of the – the intensity of the eruption. And so
then we said, let’s go and look at some eruptions where we know what happened and
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we know what the pattern looks like, like Mount St Helens, for example. And then
we found that the model fitted – we were able to fit the model to – it agreed quite well
with what had actually happened. We used recent historical eruptions to calibrate the
model. We’d also say what the wind speed was at the time, so we could calibrate it
against wind speed. So if the volcano’s in one particular place and the wind’s
blowing to the east then you expect the bigger rocks to go further to the east than they
will to the west, and so you can look at that aspect of the pattern and you observe how
far the rocks go one direction rather than another. And therefore you can work the
wind direction and the wind velocity out from the model. So we did that and that’s
now very widely used in reconstructing past eruptions round the world. I mean, that’s
the standard method that we developed then. Very recently one of my current PhD
students has done a much – updated it and sort of done a much better model and
looked at some of the issues of uncertainty and errors in the model and so she’s now
just – is publishing a paper which is a sort of much improved version of this 1986
thing that we did. But that was a – I think that was sort of an important bit of work.
And it sort of links – as I say, I continue to collaborate with people in Rhode Island.
When you say model, is this –
It’s a computer model.
Okay.
Yeah, it’s a computer model.
And so what would it look like? Did it display on a screen?
No, we didn’t have any fancy graphics at that time. I mean, nowadays people do
models and people look at them, you know, at that time we just sort of got the output
as numbers on a spreadsheet, you know, on a printout from a computer and then we
plotted them up in graphs and then used Letraset and Graph It to do our graphs.
So –
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So they were, you know, it wasn’t a – it was certainly not – at that time there wasn’t
the, you know, it was before the sort of fantastic visualisation technology that …
What sort of computer were you using then in 1986 to produce this model?
Just a – I think we were using just a sort of desktop. It was one of the early desktop
computers. You know, it wasn’t a particularly sophisticated model so we didn’t really
have to do anything, you know, big numerics or anything. It was fairly
straightforward.
And for the non programmer, how do you – what do you do sitting at the computer to
get it to run a model which sort of simulates the plume of a volcano?
Yes, well it’s always the logic of the code. I mean, the key of modelling is to get –
firstly you’ve got to hope that you’ve got the mathematics that you’re describing the
physical phenomena correct and then you’ve got to find ways – usually because there
isn’t – the mathematics is sufficiently complicated that there’s not a sort of simple one
answer, so in other words, what mathematicians call a sort of analytical solution. This
was a bit more complicated than that but not terribly more complicated. And so we
have a set of equations, we hope they’re the right equations, or we think they’re the
right equations, and then you have to code them up. You have to write the equations
in computer code and then you have to find ways of solving them numerically, which
usually means – I mean, it’s not the only – there’s a lot of different ways of doing this
but, you know, the simple thing is you – what people call convergence. You don’t
know the answer so you guess what the answer should be and put a number in. At the
beginning you have a little bit of an equation which tells you a number and you’ve
guessed the – you’ve guessed what the output should be but the number you first
calculate isn’t like that, so you then change it. It’s called iteration. So you keep
changing the number until the two match. That would be a simple example. And
that’s really just writing the mathematics in the form of a computer code really and
making the architecture of it such that it does what you want.
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And to give us a sense of the work, how long did it take you to satisfactorily code up
this?
This particular one, not very long because it really wasn’t very, you know, as I say, it
wasn’t very elaborate mathematics. I think I did it in Basic actually, if I remember
right, rather than FORTRAN. So it wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t a sophisticated
computer. I mean, these days this would be, you know, I’m sure with Mathematica or
something people would be able to solve it in sort of – very, very quickly.
But for one of the sort of perhaps simpler parts of the model in my imagination
anyway, you know, the size of the fragment going up, what would that look like in
terms of computer code?
Yes. Well, all we needed to do is – we wanted to find a particular height and a
particular distance from the axis of the plume, in other words laterally. At a particular
position we wanted to calculate the velocity of the plume, the upward velocity of the
plume, and then we want to calculate the downward velocity of the fragment of rock
and we want to find those places where those two are exactly equal. And then when
we’ve found that place we can then contour that. And we know that inside that
envelope the plume is rising faster than the rocks can fall so the rocks must go
upwards and outside that region it’s the other way around and the rocks will fall down
to the ground. So it’s an exercise in finding out where those two velocities match.
And at this time was this model being used in any sort of applied way in terms of
current volcanic activity?
Well, it was very extensively used subsequently. I mean, it still is used. I mean,
people who work on virtually – volcanoes round the world will use this method.
They’ll go and map the rock fragment sizes from past eruptions to find out how big
the eruption, or how intense the eruptions were in the past and they’ll apply this
method.
[1:15:18]
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Thank you. Are we then up to the point of the sabbatical in terms –
Yes, I think that’s probably – we’ve got there. I mean, we’ve skipped quite a lot of
the stuff with Herbert, but I think – I think that would – I mean, essentially we did a
lot of – over that ten years I did an awful lot of work, and Herbert, on really trying to
understand convection in multi component and multiphase fluids and, as I say, there
was an awful lot of interesting results that came from that.
[1:15:55]
So, as I say, going to – well, going to CALTECH, I went on – it was quite a short
sabbatical, about four months actually, but we went over to Pasadena, Los Angeles,
and spent it there and that was a really interesting little trip.
And what was the research that took place?
I’d got something called a Sherman Fairchild Scholarship from CALTECH and
basically I could do anything I liked. I mean, they just wanted me to be there to, you
know, talk to graduate students, attend seminars, do the research I was interested in.
The main research – I ended up doing sort of – the tangible result. I mean, it was a
great trip there but the most tangible result was interacting with an aeronautical
engineer in the – I was hosted in Earth and Planetary Sciences but actually ended up
doing I think the most – the research I did was mostly with this chap, Brad Sturtevant,
who was a Professor of Aeronautical Engineering. And he had apparatus for looking
at jet engines and things and he’d got interested in volcanoes and so he was saying,
well, you know, maybe some of my stuff would be interesting for, you know, we
know these volcanoes have hot gases roaring out of craters, can we use some of the
understanding of how high speed jets and jet engines work and can we apply that to
understanding how volcanoes work. So he had some wonderful experimental
apparatus which we were able to use and so we started doing – well, I shouldn’t say
he but it was – he had a graduate student who was working with him and I guess
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through my interaction with Brad the graduate student did a whole series of really
interesting experiments on very high speed flows.
Could you describe that apparatus that was –
Yeah. I mean, it was basically a giant tube. It was in a big laboratory. The tube must
have been six or seven metres high, if I remember right, probably diameter about
twenty centimetres, so really quite a big thing so you need quite a tall, you know, lab
to do that. And Brad was an expert in shock tube experiments. So if you had some
material that was under very high pressure and then you broke a – if you imagine in
this tube that you put some material at the bottom of the tube and you have a barrier, a
diaphragm, a barrier which keeps that at high pressure and above that it’s at low
pressure, and then you break the diaphragm, you want to see how this very high
pressure material expands into the low pressure region. So it’s like a – which is
broadly analogous to what happens in a volcanic explosion. So he did experiments of
two kinds, which we looked at. One was having sand, a layer of sand, with very high
pressure gas in it, and then when you break the barrier the gas in the sand sees that
there’s a low pressure up there and wants to expand and it expands violently because
the pressure’s very high. And so it then shoots up the tube and then we used high
speed film to capture these processes which were going on in microseconds. And so
we were able to look at the way the sand bed expanded and the sort of complicated
things that happened during that expansion. And then the other one was – he had
liquid Freon – and there the situation is if you have hot Freon behind a diaphragm and
then you have a low pressure region, which is below, you know, basically where it
should – the Freon should be a gas. Then if you break the diaphragm the Freon wants
to transform from a liquid into a gas very, very quickly and it does it catastrophically
and so we get another extremely high speed flow due to a phase change. And we
studied – we looked at that problem as – that as well.
So these are sort of analogues for what might be happening in volcanic eruptions.
Yes.
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But what was this equipment used for before this in terms of aeronautical
engineering?
I think that Brad was, you know, I think he was a curiosity driven scientist. He
wanted to understand multiphase flows. I’m not sure quite – I mean, this was a form
of fast fluidisation actually, you know. It’s a gas going through some sand and so
there are various engineering applications that he could, you know, fast transport of
solids and things like that that he could think of. So I think he just wanted to know
some of the basic fluid, you know, how these – the physics of how these things
worked. And so that was the sort of outcome of that trip. And then when I got to
Bristol – I got Brad to come over – we got a grant from NERC and we got Brad to
come over for a year to build some apparatus here in Bristol.
[1:21:21]
Thank you. Before we get to Bristol, I wonder whether you could say something
about your sort of personal relations with Herbert Huppert, as someone who you
worked with.
Yes.
Obviously you’ve got a sort of working relationship with him but sort of how, you
know, how you got on as –
Oh, we got on extremely well personally. I mean, he’s always been a great friend of
mine. In fact he’s currently in this department at the moment for a few months and
we’re still sort of working together a bit. So we got on very well. We’re very
different personalities. He’s an Australian and, you know, sort of quite – can be quite
sort of flamboyant at times. And he’s a very good mathematician and he also – my
experience of working with mathematicians has been somewhat mixed. There are
some which have huge intuition about the natural world and there are others who are
fantastic mathematicians but basically don’t have [laughs], as far as I could judge, so
much intuition. But Herbert was a mathematician with this great intuition about the
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natural world. He believes strongly in the power of experiments and testing of the
mathematical theories. And so the – our skills complemented each other very well
really. I – my mathematics has never been very sophisticated but I had enough of it
that I could sort of follow in a rough and ready way what he was doing
mathematically. I couldn’t do it myself but I could follow, you know, the steps he
was taking, the logic he was using, to do the mathematics. I was learning about
experiments, which Herbert was a sort of past master, and we – and I could provide
the geological – the things I could provide, which were sort of the geological context
and the motivation, identify the interesting problems, know what, you know, sort of
numbers you should put into the equations and in the models to look at what happens
in nature. And then when we got the results, you know, things which we were
satisfied from the verification of the experiments could be applied to large scale then
obviously putting numbers in and working out – calculating what would happen in
nature and then using that to interpret the rocks. So it was a very complimentary
interdisciplinary enterprise actually and we – so we just got – it was just a very good
chemistry between us in terms of complimentary skills and perspectives.
This might be difficult to answer but I was very interested in what you said about
Herbert being intuitive about the natural world as a mathematician. You may not
want to name the mathematicians that didn’t have this quality but what does it look
like, that difference? What is the difference between a mathematician who has an
intuition about the way the natural world works compared to a mathematician who
doesn’t?
Well, I think this is – I mean, this is quite subtle. I mean, again, as I say, I wouldn’t
want to name names at all. But I did work with a mathematician in the very early
days of doing numerical models and in this particular case I was interested in solving
the problem of the rates of bubble growth. And this guy was very, very good and was
in the early days of generating finite element models and so he had a lot of skills to
solve a problem which I just couldn’t solve myself, just – either my mathematics or
coding skills were just not up to doing it. So we talked a lot and we got on and he
wrote a giant code and we kept getting results from the model which were to me
preposterous as a geologist, but he was actually completely adamant that these results
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were right and he’d done the mathematics right. And we just couldn’t find a way
through. I mean, he was insistent and he really wouldn’t – my recollection is he just
wouldn’t take the argument, well, this simply is not possible, we know that this
doesn’t happen because we make these observations, this is not the right answer. I
mean, what would be analogous, that, you know, if you came up with a calculation
that the Amazon River flowed at a velocity of a kilometre per second you would know
that was not the right answer, and it was that nature. And we – so our communication
– anyway, the end of it – it was to do with pressures. At the end of the day it turned
out that his mathematics was correct and his code was correct but he had put the
pressure in CGS whereas they should have been in SI, it might have been the other
way round. But the results were coming out at a million times different from the real
result. And it wasn’t a coding error, it wasn’t his mathematics, nor was it my thing, it
was simply that the wrong – that, you know, the wrong units had been – he’d used
CGS rather than SI for pressure and therefore the numbers were a million times
different. And, you know, I suppose – and, you know, I suppose our impasse was that
in hindsight it was just so obvious that something like that must have been happening
but of course we were – he was sort of thinking, well, you know, you must have got
the geology wrong and I was thinking, well, you must have got your maths wrong or
your coding wrong, but of course neither of those was right. And that was sort of
instructive. As I say, I think that would never have happened with Herbert because
Herbert would immediately have accepted my argument that, you know, that, you
know, I knew the geology and he would also have understood that the physics, you
know, the Amazon doesn’t go at a kilometre per second or whatever and he’d have
understood that and sort of said – and gone back, well, what’s – is it the theory, is it
the model, is it the maths, is it the coding or is it some simple mistake like that.
Is there a reason in Herbert’s sort of background or interest why he is more likely to
–
Yes, I think because he started out life as an applied mathematician working in –
doing his PhD in physical oceanography at Scripps, so he was very much at, you
know, the sharp end of natural – applying maths to natural sciences. His whole career
has been – he started out doing his PhD in physical oceanography, so he was always, I
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suppose, trained – I suppose it’s, you know, so I, you know, Herbert would have to
answer a question like that. I would imagine that it’s a combination of his, you know,
this sort of intuition. I mean, it’s a, you know, I was mentioning my supervisor
George Walker, it’s the same sort of – in a way it’s the same sort of intuition that
George had, you know, that there’s a feeling for how the natural world works which
you can’t sort of express in a simple way. But, you know, why some people have that
intuition and others don’t, I’m sure that’s – there’s no simple answer to that.
[1:29:08]
Thank you. And while at Cambridge, could you talk about what was going on in the
department in terms of what colleagues that you didn’t work with necessarily were
doing? You know, what were other people doing in the Department of Geology at
Cambridge at this time, or Department of Earth Sciences?
Oh well, I mean, there was some great stuff going. I mean, it was a fantastic place to
be around. You know, people like Dan McKenzie and Keith O’Nions and they’re sort
of giants in their field. And of course Ron was there, although he was much more
now into admin and, you know, sort of strategic leadership, but Ron was there. We
had, you know, young colleagues like Mike Bickle and Euan Nisbet there and the
palaeontologists like Simon Conway-Morris and Derek Briggs – oh sorry, no, Derek
had left by that time. There was Simon Conway-Morris. And there were some very
good colleagues. I mean, actually – I actually wrote very little- very few papers with
other colleagues in the department when I look back on it. Most of the papers from
that time were either with PhD students or with Herbert.
And did Herbert come to your department to work or did you –
No, we – DAMTP’s [Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics]
just down the street, you know, in Silver Street, so it’s about three or four minutes
walk, so we sort of – and the labs were in the DAMTP where we did the experiments
so I would go down there quite a lot. So we just – it was fairly easy – it was close
enough, we could communicate very easily.
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What was the nature and extent of your relationship with Dan McKenzie? Dan being
someone who was working on the mantle.
Yeah. I mean, Dan obviously is a fantastic person to have around. I mean, he very
much does his own stuff and on his own terms. I think we have one paper which
involves Dan and myself and Herbert, which we did towards the end. So Dan took an
interest in what we were doing but didn’t get involved in – obviously one took an
interest in what Dan was doing but I never really – as I say, we never really
collaborated in any sense. But, you know, we talked science quite a lot, you know,
over coffee and at seminars and things like that.
[1:31:34]
Where did you live at this time in Cambridge? Where were the family living?
Oh, we lived in a place called Comberton, which is just outside – we started out in a
flat in Fen Causeway, just near Trumpington, a little bit closer to the centre of the city,
but then we quickly bought a house out in Comberton, one of the commuting villages
outside Cambridge, and that’s where we lived all the time.
And did any more children come along?
Yeah, we had another son, so we had two sons. So they were, you know, sort of
primary school aged kids when we were in Cambridge.
What was the extent of your wife’s interest in your work, or perhaps even help with
your work? I don’t know …
Yes. I mean, she’s always been interested and supportive of it. Obviously the fact
that I had to go away on field trips – the nature of the work involved field trips that
obviously took me away for periods. I think she did a – when we – I’m not sure
exactly when this was, possibly – and she did an O level geology, just so she sort of
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understood a little bit more about what I did. She was a teacher, a primary school
teacher, which she did for a while and then she started – she got sort of fed up with
that a little bit but also with the family, she did some sort of part time work for a
company which did reading materials for young children. And then she got a job
actually – towards the end she got a job with – in the earth science department
actually, working with some of the sort of Arctic research groups, I think sort of
compiling geological data. So she did that for a bit. But I think her interests were sort
of, you know, primary school and education and teaching and things were the things
she was sort of interested in.
So she did an O level geology course?
Geology, that’s right.
As a way of trying to sort of access –
Yeah, at least to have access to something about what I was doing. And later on of
course she came out to Montserrat a couple of times when I was working there and so
sort of saw some of the sort of practical implications of some of the work I was doing.
[1:33:59]
This may not be possible, but is it possible to describe a sort of typical day at
Cambridge at this point, taking in the fact that, you know, you’ve got a family at home
and you’ve got work. So what was the sort of typical day?
Oh yeah, a very – typical is very hard to say. Obviously I was teaching. I was
eventually made a fellow of Trinity Hall and so had tutorial work to do. Early on –
Cambridge believe in – at the time, probably still do, believe in throwing you in the
deep end in terms of teaching, so my first task on teaching was actually to teach very
bright physics students about – space groups in mineral physics and x-ray diffraction
and things like that. So I had to learn a lot of things I’d not learnt before about
symmetry and different sorts of geometrical group and crystallography. And I had to
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teach in the material science programme. So that – yeah, so we – so, I mean, I was
doing my lecturing and teaching. I was doing research. But I guess it was a fairly
sort of – except when I was away on field trips, it would be a fairly – actually a fairly
regular, almost nine to five job in a way. I lift shared with a colleague from the maths
department who lived in the same village and so we’d sort of, you know, do a regular
sort of commute and get there sort of half eight, nine and leave about half five. You
know, if there was a seminar on you might stay on for a bit and go to the pub or
something like that to – on occasion. But, you know, fairly – I think fairly sort of
regular in that sense. I mean, nothing out of the ordinary. The nature of my science I
think – I mean, I know that there are other areas of science where people had to work
phenomenal hours, particularly in sort of geochemistry and some of the biology
departments where we – one of my neighbours in – our next door neighbour was a
Dane who – a Danish guy and he was a post doc working in the – who’s – one of the
famous Nobel Prize biochemistry labs in Cambridge and he was working there and he
was separating proteins from cows’ blood. And I remember, you know, he would
regularly have to go in every evening to look at his extractions or come back at one or
two in the morning. So, you know, I know that there were other sorts of science
going on there which did demand these sort of tremendously long hours and
dedication. I guess I was lucky that I didn’t really have that – the nature of the
science I did didn’t mean I had to do these sort of fantastically long hours.
Why are those two kinds of science different? Why would that kind of science require
it and volcanology not?
I don’t know. I guess volcanology is – I mean, those sorts of sciences – the fact that
you can have experiments running for very long times. When you’re doing synthesis
or an extraction, you know, you have to be there to make sure things don’t go wrong.
You don’t want your experiment to go wrong. So I think it’s just the nature of the
science perhaps, you know. And also I suppose it’s just personality, you know. I was
sort of quite happy coming home in a sort of regular basis.
[1:37:48]
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And what – in the same way that I asked you what memories you had of time spent
with your father, what memories do you have of time spent with your young children
during these Cambridge years, things done with them?
Yes. I mean, we’d – as you’d probably anticipate, we – because I was a sports fan I –
and both my boys have been very good at sports, then I sort of supported their, you
know, doing mostly football but also the older one was a very good tennis player so
he got into the – at one time he got into the sort of Avon County team and so I’d go
and support him doing that. And we, you know, did the usual things of walks or
trying to interest them in various things. I mean, we did sort of a number of bird
watches, the usual sort of kids – when they were much, you know, very – quite young,
the sort of usual children’s parties and things. And it was a nice village so they made
lots of friends on the street without any cars on it, which was nice, and so they could
play out. So it was a sort of reasonably nice environment. And it’s a village, you
know, with villagers who – nothing to do with academia, who we got to know and
became friends. So I would say it was a sort of, you know, reasonably normal family
life. As I say, I did have to go away on field trips so that obviously meant, you know,
my wife had to sort of cope with the children while I was away. We had reasonably
supportive grandparents. At least my – certainly my father and stepmother would be
down from time to time. And they lived up in Chester at the time so we could go up
and see them and they would come down and stay with us and help out. My mother
in law also came around sometimes, but she was a slightly more awkward personality
so [laughs] it was – that was a help sometimes. I mean, she liked the young children
of course.
[1:39:59]
And what was your wife’s view of times that you spent away? How did she manage
when you were away?
Yeah, I think sometimes she found it difficult, particularly when I was away for long
periods, I think. And so I guess over the years I’ve tried to sort of keep those trips,
you know, I no longer go for enormous long, you know, sort of five or six weeks
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away. I try and sort of cut it down to sort of, you know, relatively short trips when I
do have to go to a conference or do a bit of fieldwork.
[1:40:31]
And when you met non scientists in the village where you lived and they found out that
you were a volcanologist, what did they tend to ask you about it?
Yeah. Well, I mean, a lot of people in the public really find them fascinating, so I
think they – it’s also a sort of topic of conversation of course that you work on
volcanoes. And so sometimes it comes up. I mean, I would say – it’s interesting that
on the whole – and I live in a village now in the Mendips and when you’re dealing
with local people – they’re interested but they don’t want to talk about that all the
time of course, you know. It’s an interesting thing that you do and so particularly
when meeting new people they’ll ask you about it, but on the whole when you make
sort of friends outside academia you tend to be talking about all sorts of other things,
not about your, you know, sort of, your work.
Thank you. What was the effect on your career of becoming an FRS, if anything? I
don’t know how it works.
I think it was quite – I mean, I think it had a huge effect. Herbert got his FRS in ’87,
then I got mine in ’88 and I think the work – certainly the work that we did together
was a sort of significant factor. And the fact that the work was so sort of
collaborative, that, you know, you would – and so it had a big effect. Of course
obviously my father could come to the ceremony and he was sort of enormously
proud and all that. And so I remember the ceremony being a very nice occasion. And
of course it did mean – undoubtedly it must have played a big factor in getting the
Bristol job, ‘cause I was still a lecturer and relatively, you know, when I applied for
the Bristol job I was still relatively junior and a lecturer, hadn’t been promoted to
senior lecturer or reader or anything, so getting it was sort of quite a big deal. And of
course, we talked about it yesterday, I was only thirty-eight [thirty-nine] so it was
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fairly early, particularly for sort of natural scientists, to get that accolade. So it did
have a – yeah, so I mean, it obviously was a big event.
I haven’t actually, across any of these interviews, got a description of the ceremony
for the FRS. In fact I’m not sure that I realised there was one. What did yours
consist of?
Well, it’s a – my recollection of it – it’s changed now, they do it a different way, but
at the time you go to the big lecture hall in the Royal Society. The president has a –
there’s somebody with a mace and the president walks up and they make a welcoming
speech. And there’ll be sort of thirty or so new – at the time thirty-five new fellows.
And then there’s a little bit said about them and then Newton’s signature is displayed,
I think, you know, it’s on there. And then you go and sign the book, you know, put
your signature in the book. I don’t – and then you have – I can’t remember – I’ve no
idea what – I’m sure there must have been champagne involved, but there was some
sort of reception thing after it. I can’t remember it lasting, you know, and the families
come along, so my father and my stepbrother and stepsister and my wife and children
were there. So there was a sort of group from my family and they came along and we
went to a reception. I can’t remember it being very long, I think just in an afternoon.
Are you presented with something? Are you given something?
Yeah, you’re given a scroll, you know, you’re given a scroll in a tube, I think is what
you get.
[1:44:25]
By this time were your children showing interest in what you were doing or were they
old enough to –
Not particularly. They all – they both showed some interest in it. They were quite –
both of them were quite – the older one was probably slightly more academic than the
younger one at the time in school, when they were kids, although they sort of reversed
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later in life in some ways. And they took an interest in it. The older one became
interested in sort of bird watching at one time and I took them off for that, so – and we
took them for walks. By then they were mostly, to be honest, interested in kicking
footballs around and throwing cricket balls and things. So as I say, the older one was
– well, they were both reasonably good tennis players for their, you know, that age,
and the older one got into the sort of county training set and we could go and support
him. But I think, you know, they were very sporty boys and – and yeah, they had an
interest in it and they still do.
So why – I realise the Cambridge appointment was fixed term, but how is it that you
came to Bristol? What is the story of that?
Well – should we take a – I mean, I was just thinking –
[End of Track 3]
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Track 4
Yes, so if you could tell the story of applying for and getting the post at Bristol, why it
was that you went for that as opposed to anything else and perhaps other options that
you considered at the same time.
Yeah. Well, I think it came up – of course the Bristol job came up because of the
Oxburgh Review. And it’s just probably sort of briefly worth just saying a little bit
about what happened with the Oxburgh Review, that the – I think the government at
the time wanted to see if they could get efficiency gains in the universities, not just
financial but educational improvements by looking at particular subjects and then
seeing how perhaps they could, you know, a more rational – they could rationalise the
distribution of resources and activities, educational activities in particular subjects
around the universities. And I think earth science came up because it was a science
but it wasn’t such a big science as physics and chemistry, so it would be a good place
to start. So I think the Oxburgh Review was, you know, asked – it was asked the
question that you’d –
Excuse me, sorry.
[End of Track 4]
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Track 5
Yes, the story of the appointment.
Yes, that’s right. What happened was that there’d been something called the Oxburgh
Review of Earth Science, which was a sort of attempt by the government to rationalise
educational activities in universities within particular subjects. And earth science was
thought to be a good place to start. It wasn’t as big as chemistry and physics. So Ron
Oxburgh was given – tasked to do the Oxburgh Review. And they looked at all the
geology departments round the country and they obviously made the observation that
there were a lot of them, and of course some of them were quite small and this didn’t
seem to be perhaps such a, you know, an efficient use of resources. And how would
you – I think the idea was, well, how would you reconstruct geology in British
universities to make it more competitive internationally. And so that was the task of
the review and they came up with the conclusion that some departments really were –
hadn’t got critical mass and so perhaps should close completely. Others which should
be perhaps merged, Aston and Birmingham, you know, for example, both have –
same city, two departments, why not amalgamate them into one, Newcastle and
Durham and so forth. And then you had – obviously you wanted – so I think the
general idea was to reduce the total number of geology departments, or that was the
sort of recommendations that were made, and you’d focus your resources on larger
more competitive – internationally more competitive institutions. So I think that was
the idea of the Oxburgh Review. So in that context Bristol was a relatively small
department in a very strong – I think Bristol science, particularly physics, was sort of
already established as extremely strong, so the science faculty were very strong. The
geology department here was really relatively small compared to many geology
departments. It was pretty good in parts. There was really excellent palaeontology,
for example, here. It was somewhat traditional in the style of geology that it taught
and researched in. And there really wasn’t very, you know, I think the feeling was
that something should be done about Bristol. And at the time there were some
options, one of which would have been to close, but I don’t think people felt that it
was a particularly weak place, it was just sort of small and perhaps just hadn’t got
critical mass. But maybe it should combine with Cardiff or Exeter, those were ideas
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that were floating around at the time. I wasn’t a party to any of this so, you know, the
– but eventually the vice chancellor, Sir John Kingman, I think, presumably with
other senior managers, said, ‘Well look, we’ve got a really strong science faculty. We
should have a really strong sort of state of the art earth science department at Bristol.
And so why don’t we – why don’t we actually invest money into it?’ And we asked
the HFC at the time, why don’t you put some money into it as well, and that’s what
they decided to do. And the end result was that they said, well, we’ll find – they did
three things. One was obviously very difficult. They needed to look at some of the
staff and find alternative employment within the university to create space to, you
know, build up a new – build up a strong department. So there were some people here
who were – thought that it would be better if they were reemployed in some other
way. And they actually did a lot of work with people to help them get into other jobs.
One or two people who were really quite good but felt the writing, you know, this is
uncertain times, and they actually left, so there were some staff who left. I think the
faculty would have been about fifteen or sixteen [coughs]. And so these exercises
meant – and then they decided, well, what we’ll do is we’ll make two professorial
appointments. The then head of department, David Dineley, had been head of
department for twenty years and he was retiring, so it seemed an opportune time. So
they said, we’ll appoint two new professors and we will make – with the people who
have been redeployed or who’d left, and we would then – and building on some of the
strengths, like the palaeontology, we’ll reconstitute this department by bringing in two
new professors. So they went and advertised them and I was sort of encouraged to
apply. I was – I think I was sort of approached and told, this job’s coming up, would
you be interested. And I thought, yep, I was interested.
Who by?
I’m not sure I remember actually, whether it was somebody from Bristol or – I think it
was somebody from Bristol actually sort of alerted me to the job. And I applied and
Bernie Wood applied and there were other candidates, but we were interviewed
individually and Bernie and I were appointed to these chairs. And after some
discussions with Bernie, we agreed that I would be the first head of department for the
first five years. So that’s how it came about.
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[6:17]
Before we go onto what you then do, the people who were reemployed, in what way
were they reemployed? In academic posts in other departments?
Yeah, in academic or administrative posts, yeah. There was – I think that one became
sort of an administrator. Another one was sort of turned into a sort of admissions
tutor. They were sort of – they were involved in other things where their skills were
looked at. Nobody actually lost their job per se, they were given other opportunities.
And what – when you say that the geology in part was traditional, what does that
mean?
It’s – the usual things that you expect in a geology department. There’s
palaeontology, mineralogy, petrology, structural geology, tectonics, those are –
sedimentology. These are all the things that Bristol did and was well known for and
did well. I think, with probably the exception of palaeontology, they really weren’t
quite at the sort of cutting edge of the science of the time. And so a lot of the sort of
new areas which were opening up in the sort of late’ 80s hadn’t, you know, weren’t
being addressed in Bristol from a research point of view.
What are those sorts of things that weren’t being addressed?
Well, I think it was the sort of – the whole issue of – they had no – they had very
limited geochemistry and, you know, at the time the big departments really had people
like Keith O’Nions running big mass spectrometers and things. So they had no – they
had no sort of cutting edge – the facilities were quite modest at Bristol, so in terms of
experimental and analytical work, so it was quite field oriented. As I say, they had
some super palaeontologists, but of course their work was around – looking at fossils
and, you know, doesn’t – didn’t require big kit or anything. So, you know, as I say, I
don’t – it was perfectly respectable high quality geology of the sort of traditional –
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broadly of the traditional kind, I think. And I would say that probably palaeontology
was the area where they still excelled.
[9:01]
As the new head of department, what was your – what were your sort of aims for these
five years, or perhaps even what were you tasked by the university with doing?
Well, we were – it was very simple really. We – the expectation is that we’d turn
Bristol into a world class earth science department. That was the mission. And we
had a, you know, certainly a lot of help. John Kingman came up with money and
HEFCE came up with money, so we had about – a couple of million pounds to spend,
which, you know, back in 1989, that’s a significant amount of money to spend on new
kit. We had about six new appointments to make, lecturers and so forth. And so we
were able to bring in some really very talented sort of mid early career scientists. And
so we had an opportunity to really – firstly make – transform the department into a
department where there were – a lot of experiments were done. Bernie of course –
Bernie Wood is a high pressure experimentalist, mineralogist, geochemist. I brought
in the sort of fluid mechanics and volcanology side. We were then able to make
appointments to strengthen isotope geochemistry and get state of the art geochemistry
and experimental facilities. So the place – I mean, the mission was to use this money
to transform the place into somewhere which was doing an awful lot of cutting edge
research with a strong analytical and experimental side and in several areas, not, you
know, as I say, not just palaeontology.
Let’s start with the kit then, or the equipment, what did you buy? What did you
install?
Well, I built a fluid mechanics lab, which is still there. That’s what I wanted. I
wanted – I sort of said, where we could do these sort of analogue experiments. Bernie
wanted high pressure cubic – sorry, high pressure equipment to take rocks to
tremendously high temperature and pressure and look at what happens in the deep
earth. So he wanted that. Both of us wanted a really good workshop, so we wanted to
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really strengthen the workshop so we could make our own equipment in house. So at
the time I think we had a – there was a workshop, there was a small workshop with,
you know, one technician and so we expanded that to three machinists, technicians,
who could build kit up for ourselves. We bought an electron microprobe, which is the
instrument I mentioned earlier, which analyses minerals in minute detail. That’s
absolutely an essential piece of kit for any modern, you know, analytical studies of
volcanic rocks or any rock for that matter or minerals. So we bought that electron
probe. We got – hired a technician – a technical staff to run that. So we expanded the
technical skills of the department to cope with this sort of new era of analysis and
experiment. And then we went out and looked for really talented scientists to hire.
And so we then went about hiring a sort of spectrum of mid career to early career
academic staff. And so we had these sort of six posts to fill and we sort of filled them
in the first two years.
[12:39]
Who did you employ and why did you employ those particular people?
Well, we – I think Bernie and I had a very similar vision. Within some constraints,
we wanted to get really – and I learnt this from Cambridge too, that the route to
success is not to be too prescriptive in appointing people but to get really talented
people wherever they come from. And so we were not – we didn’t start with, you
know, we must have somebody who does exactly this. We wanted to look at a wide
spectrum of earth scientists and we wanted to hire the best people we could possibly
get. Now we had some constraints because if we’re going to run an isotope
[laboratory], you know, we’re going to go into isotope geochemistry we have to have
some people who do that. So we wanted to – so there were some constraints, which
were partly moderated by the sorts of science and kit that we could get. So we, for
example, hired a chap called Martin Palmer, who’s now the sort of dean of science in
Southampton University, as a very bright and promising young isotope geochemist.
And Martin came and did his stuff and he brought a lot of – doing a lot of stuff in the
oceans, chemical oceanography and oceanography stuff, a very different sort of
science to anything anybody had done at Bristol before, and got mass spectrometers
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and things like that for him. We hired a chap called Mike Carroll, who is an
American. Hired two Americans, Mike Carroll, who is a very able experimentalist,
and we hired Mike Benton, who’s – at that time was a sort of very precocious young
vertebrate palaeontologist, working in sort of the area of dinosaur evolution. And
Mike’s now one of the sort of – he’s still a professor in the department and is sort of
one of the – sort of the most eminent sort of vertebrate palaeontologists. But at the
time we hired him he was a sort of, you know, sort of relatively young guy. And
George Helffrich, who is a seismologist, a woman called Vala Ragnarsdottir, who is a
geochemist, and so on. So we, you know, we think – we aimed to get people who
were going to be really top notch scientists, so that was our sort of policy. And we
didn’t much mind what they did in detail. That would sort of take care of itself, we
thought. So the department always had a – I mean, some people – the culture of the
department that has developed is I would say very collegial but somewhat anarchic
[laughs], you know. We hire good people and we let them get on with it.
[15:54]
And what were you able to do in terms of your own research in this period?
I decided when I got here I wanted to do two things. One, I wanted to set up a fluid
mechanics lab, and because of the CALTECH thing I wanted to get into high speed
flows in volcanic nozzles and vents. And so we – I got a NERC grant to bring Brad
Sturtevant from CALTECH, the aeronautical engineer, over to Bristol fairly early on
and got some post doc money for having somebody to work on that. And so we built
shock tube experimental gear in our own lab.
Shock tube?
Yeah, like these tubes with high speed flows that, you know, mimic what happens
inside a volcano. And so we built that apparatus and we hired – we built up a fluid
mechanics lab so we could do experiments. So that was one aspect of me coming
here. The other one was I wanted to do something – go to a very different part of the
world to do fieldwork and carry on my work on young volcanoes. And so I got a
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chance in ’89, just after I’d got here, [in] 1990, to go out to Chile, and I started
working with people at the Geological Survey of Chile on the Andean volcanoes.
And that project has really lasted about fifteen years. I don’t go out there so much –
that work has – that sort of thing, but certainly for a good twelve or so years I had
PhD students working in Chile and I went to Chile to look at work on geological maps
and had the odd post doc. So I made the Andes a sort of – my sort of area of interest.
Can you explain why – from a volcanology point of view, why that was an area that
you chose, why that was an interesting area?
I think again it’s probably serendipitous to some extent. I think because I’d been to
the Andes with Peter Francis, the Cerro Galan, the Argentine expedition, I’d seen just
how spectacular – what a spectacular place it is to work. So I sort of – I had this sort
of background idea, I really should go back there some time. Then I got contacted by
– I had a PhD student, a Canadian, and he was working on lava flows and I contacted
– there was an eruption of Lonquimay Volcano in the Southern Andes in ’89, ’90, and
it linked quite well to the project that my PhD student was doing. And I got in contact
with somebody I didn’t know terribly well – well, I asked Peter Francis actually, who
would I get in contact with? And he suggested a name, a chap called Jose Naranjco
and I contacted Jose and he was working on this eruption for the Geological Survey of
Chile. So we asked if we could come out and have a look at it. And so I went out
with a PhD student and we did some work on it. And then sort of one thing led to
another and I started getting to know other Chileans in the Geological Survey and I
started work with particularly Jose and another woman called Moyra Gardeweg, who
was on the survey, and she and I worked on some – started to work on a volcano in
the north of the country. And I think actually ultimately it was through – that both of
these people knew Peter Francis quite well and so I was sort of introduced to them
and started working with them.
And could you say what in particular is – are these erupting volcanoes? They’re
active volcanoes?
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They’re a bit of both. I mean, we’ve been working on active and sort of dormant
ones, so it’s a combination of geological mapping and studies and sampling and
working on volcanoes which have been erupting. So – and, you know, they are
fantastically well exposed, the Andean volcanoes. So it was a mixture of the two
really. And so I suppose I was working on the history of the volcanoes, the physics of
the eruptions and so it was continuing a strand of work but, you know, based on –
using the Andes as sort of the field area.
What does it mean, that they were well exposed?
Well, that means plenty of rocks around basically. I mean, if you go to, you know,
Indonesia or the Amazon, it’s covered in tropical rainforest, you don’t see many
rocks. The places where you can actually sample and look at rocks are few and far
between. But in the High Andes you’ve got, you know, rivers cutting mountains and
environments so there’s plenty of exposures of the rocks from which you can make
geological observations.
So it allows you to study this area.
It allows you – yes, that’s right. You wouldn’t – you’re in a much better area in –
studying a volcano in the Andes is much better in a way than studying it in Indonesia
from an academic point of view because the Indonesian volcano would just be
covered in impenetrable rainforest and it would be really tough to get information,
extract information, whereas in the Andes it’s dry and there are big huge canyons and
Cabradas cut by melt waters and you just get great exposures of rock.
[21:55]
What’s the difference in approach to studying an erupting volcano, an active volcano,
as opposed to a sort of historical event? What do you do that is different, you know,
in each case?
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Yes, I think that’s a good question. I mean, it’s – in the former, the study of the
ancient – the volcano that’s not erupting but you’re looking at its history, then you’re
very much in the business of using geological observations to infer what has happened
in the past and to reconstruct that history, you know, how big the eruptions are, how
frequently they’ve erupted, what sort of eruptions were they. When you’re working
on an active volcanic system then you’re really trying to understand the processes as
they happen. And of course you’ve got the huge advantage that you can – you don’t
have to infer some of the things that happened, you can see them happen. So the two
sorts of study are actually very complementary because you can use the – you can use
them together to understand the whole process. So I’ve never sort of seen them as
completely different sorts of study. They’re sort of complimentary. And so many of
the things we do in an active volcano would be quite similar. We’d map – after the
eruption we would map out where the blocks of rocks were thrown and where the
flows went and so forth.
What do you do in terms of actually recording what’s happening in a volcano that is
erupting? Because I know that in the laboratory you’re interested in the jet that is
coming out of the crater.
Yeah.
And with a volcano that’s erupting, you’ve got that sort of happening in a sense in
front of you. Is there a way of recording that in some way, of getting measurements of
its temperature or velocity or –
That’s right. Well, taking film is the obvious first thing you do and that’s – I took
films of some of these early – of some of the eruptions and then we’d have still
photographs that you can use. What I didn’t do very much of until I got involved in
Montserrat later on is that – you’re quite right that there are a whole series of methods
of monitoring volcanoes and characterising what happens, seismology – networks of
seismology near the volcanoes to look at the vibrations that occur during the eruption,
defamation of the landscape and gases coming out and you measure the composition
of the gases and so forth. I wasn’t involved in much of that sort of work at all. I
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mean, I took an interest in it but it wasn’t my field. I’m not a, you know, I’m not
somebody who goes out and puts out geophysical instruments or tries to understand
seismic signals. That somewhat changed when Montserrat happened, but of course in
the Andes you were working on relatively remote – really rather remote volcanoes
which weren’t monitored very much at all anyway. I mean, none of the volcanoes
really had seismometers on them or these sort of instruments you might get on
Hawaiian volcanoes, for example. So we were not working with volcanoes where you
could very easily apply those sorts of methods. And in fact I didn’t have the expertise
really to do that sort of work.
And what is involved in particular in videoing an erupting volcano? ‘Cause perhaps
there’s more to it than simply putting a video camera in front of it. What do you have
to do in order to make this sort of worthwhile, make this video footage data –
Well actually, it is – it was actually at the time not much different from that. I mean, I
had a sixteen millimetre Bolex camera and you’d just stick it on the ground and film
the volcano. And, you know, you obviously would like to – you wanted to know
where the volcano was and where the camera was so that you could then scale the
images that you got back, but it wasn’t much, you know, it wasn’t anything very
sophisticated. Of course the technology since then has moved on absolutely
fantastically, so things you can do now with radar and other techniques, acoustic
energy, there’s lots of techniques, but those are all things that didn’t really – hadn’t
really been developed yet.
[26:39]
Thank you. And so I wonder whether you could describe some of the experiments that
you did in the new fluid mechanical –
Yeah. We did a lot of different sorts of experiments. I don’t want to go through the
whole list. I mean, the shock tube experiments were pretty interesting. We did some
experiments where we created violent flows by mixing acids and bases. So, you
know, we had carbonate and then put in some acid and then that created bubbles of
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carbon dioxide violently. And so we had to build some quite sophisticated and
corrosion resistant apparatus to do that, with Brad’s help, Brad Sturtevant’s help. And
we used the workshop to help build this equipment. And we had to put things like
little pressure pads in to measure pressures and where appropriate temperatures. So
you built some quite complicated – more complicated than the previous apparatus to
sort of try and look at these very violent flows. And we had a high speed camera in
the lab that – we took films of the activity and made measurements of them. And I
had a couple of very good post docs, who are now members of staff here and their
own independent researchers, but at the time they were doing – they were doing –
they were helping out in these sort of shock tube experiments. So that was good. I
mean, we learnt a lot about, you know, what happens in – what might happen inside a
volcano and the sorts of flows that – very violent flows that you could never actually
observe in a real volcano.
And was it – was the point of it to sort of – to understand how movement happens at
that speed, you know? What is the – what was seen as the sort of – a value of looking
at these high speed flows?
Well, so that we understood the processes that go on underground, because they’re
ultimately controlling what happens in the air. So, you know, we’re erupting stuff
through cracks and fissures and tubes in the earth, natural tubes in the earth, conduits,
and we know those flows are very complicated and violent and we wanted to
understand those flows much better and understand what might be happening. So
that’s really the rationale for those sorts of experiments.
So by understanding the flows you could say what was happening below to produce
that particular kind of flow.
That’s right, yep, that’s right yeah.
[29:20]
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So yeah, so the, you know, I mean, perhaps – I’m not sure whether you – to deviate a
little bit. I mean, it’s worth just going back to the sort of department. When I got
here, it must have had perhaps eight or nine PhD students or so, I don’t know the
exact numbers, and it had no post docs, so I brought the first post doc to the
department [laughs]. One of my former PhD students from Cambridge came. So we
of course had to build up a lot of the sort of expertise and funding from sort of scratch
really, you know, to do this sort of work.
[30:01]
Thank you. I wonder whether you could tell me about work, which I think started
around 1992, on advising on the geological disposal of nuclear waste.
Yes, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that – that has never been a major research strand for me.
It’s always been more using my sort of expertise and knowledge to advise in various
contexts. So around 1993, I think it would have been, I was asked to go on a science
panel for UK Nirex, which at the time was the organisation which was responsible for
disposing of nuclear waste in the UK. Keith O’Nions was the chair of that panel and
he asked – invited me to be part of that panel. And so the reason that – it seems a
little bit odd at first sight that somebody interested in volcanology and the sort of
research I do would be relevant, but the fact is that the rocks of the Lake District are
all old volcanic rocks and at the time Nirex were very interested in disposing of
nuclear – radioactive waste near Sellafield and this was the sort of – this seemed to be
the preferred site. And if you were going to bury the nuclear waste in the volcanic
rocks, you actually had to understand the geology and part of that understanding was,
you know, an understanding of the volcanic geology. And so that’s, I suppose, where
my – the reason for my expertise – bringing me in. And that was a really fascinating
period. We were in a panel which was advising UK Nirex on their programme of
research, R&D, and we were exposed to all the debates of the time about the
desirability or not of burying radioactive waste. And so it was a very interesting
experience of seeing the interface of science and policy and public understanding –
the public perception of nuclear waste was clearly an absolutely critical issue, so it
was not just – the whole issue was not just science and the technical feasibility, it was
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all about how people responded, the degree of opposition to a radioactive research
programme, the way in which Nirex handled their public face, the issues – at the time,
you know, they were still – I suppose there was still an aftermath of the Cold War and
people’s fear of anything nuclear and suspicion of the nuclear industry, for very good
reasons. So it was a very interesting education actually as well as providing some
technical scientific advice but actually seeing how this issue was tackled and what the
difficulties were.
Could you go into those debates? What in detail was being discussed in terms of – for
example, if we could take the sort of – the public view of nuclear waste?
Well, I think you – there’s two sides of this. There’s – the technical aspect is that you
completely leave out any issue about the, you know, the public and policy and things
like that, then obviously you can identify ways of disposing of nuclear waste and you
can optimise – so you would think – just technically you would find the best place to
bury it and the radioactivity didn’t escape easily and that’s where you’d choose. Of
course that’s not anything like what happens in reality because if you - [it]turned out
that the best place to bury nuclear – was right beneath of centre of Birmingham,
geologically that was the best place, you wouldn’t be able to do that because that
would clearly be just a nonstarter, to find a major city and decide to bury nuclear
waste under it. It just wouldn’t be politically or socially acceptable. So that’s really
the nature of the – in a way that encapsulates the nature of the debate and is – it’s the
– and also if you’re dealing with nuclear waste you don’t – it’s not just that the
geology is very good, it – where’s the nuclear waste, where are the power stations.
We have to transport the nuclear waste from one place to another, so Birmingham
wouldn’t be a great place to, you know, to come down the M5 with a truck full of
nuclear waste might not be a good – that entails risks in itself. So you come into a
whole series of complicated socioeconomic issues, which you – which have to be
matched with the technical requirements to find a solution to the problem. And at the
time – and this may be a sort of, you know, I’m not sure whether this is a balanced
view or not. I suspect it’s just my impressions, which is that at the time the UK Nirex
were very – an organisation dominated by engineers, dominated by the idea, you
know, that they could engineer this problem and that they might have been right that
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they could engineer this problem. They could create safe barriers underground. And
they didn’t probably put enough – anything like enough effort in the engagement with
the public and public debate and the concerns of the public, you know, rational or not,
about this issue. And so they really came a cropper because they wanted to – they did
two things, which – I’m sure anyone involved in this will probably have different
stories, but … They did a sifting exercise of looking round Britain to find out the
places where you – geologically might be good for burying nuclear waste. And the
shortlist that came out was Sellafield and Dounreay. And some people thought this
was a bit of a coincidence, that the geologically best places would happen to be next
to the major nuclear installations in Britain. That’s what the sifting process seemed to
end up with. So that I think wasn’t a particularly good start and they were never
terribly convincing at the time in sort of saying what the reasons were for saying these
were the best places. And Sellafield became the place that was earmarked. And that
then led to an awful lot of opposition from the environmental antinuclear group about
Sellafield and about the whole concept of geological disposal even. They eventually
came a cropper because they – Nirex had planning permission to put a – they did an
awful lot of work round Sellafield, drilled holes and geology and geophysics, and then
they wanted to put an underground laboratory to test out the suitability of the site.
And that would mean basically mining underground a series of caverns in which you
did a lot of tests. And that was thought by some of the opposition to be a sort of – a
political ploy to get, you know, once they’d got underground and done this test then
they were suspicious, again rightly or wrongly I don’t [know] – is another matter, but
they were – there was a suspicion amongst some quarters that this was just a ploy to
get the waste site there. So there was a public inquiry. It was the end of 1996,
Cumbria County Council involved, the thing collapsed. They couldn’t get planning
permission for this. And the Conservatives were in the – it was in the dog days of the
– Major’s administration, they didn’t appear to have a great interest in dealing with an
issue which had great controversy and long term implications but hugely
controversial, so it was sort of sidelined. And Nirex sort of basically sort of almost
collapsed. I mean, it carried on but it reduced in size. And the Labour government
came in and they really, you know, they didn’t want to do very much about this issue.
They were sort of into alternative energy as the sort of way forward, not enthusiastic
about things nuclear. And so very little was done until probably around 2006, ’07
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actually. So I was part of that. You know, of course the science panel was disbanded
once this, you know, this public inquiry finished, but it was, you know, a very
interesting period to sort of see these sort of complicated interactions and the, you
know, political dimension of science policy.
Who else was on the science panel with you?
There was John Lloyd. There was a guy from – was it – what’s his name, erm …
There was myself, John Lloyd, Keith O’Nions. There was one other, er … Yeah, I’ll
have to check with that. John Lloyd was the hydrologist, I was the geologist. Keith
was the – I think – we had some guy – was it Tony Batchelor? We certainly involved
Tony Batchelor from the sort of south – from a company in the south west of England.
He certainly came to quite a lot of the meetings. We had – the meetings we had were
often with contractors who were doing work for Nirex and the Nirex scientists. It was
quite a small panel.
And do you remember what you were able to advise, what you thought scientifically
about the issue?
Yes, I think we provided a lot of guidance about the science. We were sort of
supposed to be there as friendly critics, you know. We weren’t there to be sort of –
just rubberstamp things, we were there to look at the science that was going on and
say, you know, what we thought about it, whether we thought the quality was high.
There was a lot – like a lot of rad waste programmes, the Nirex themselves weren’t
doing a huge amount of it. It was all subcontracted to other organisations, like the
British Geological Survey and big drilling companies and geothermal companies and
Schlumberger and other companies doing the work for them and they would be
managing. That was a typical model, they would be managing it. There would be
scientists but they wouldn’t – they would have knowledgeable scientists who were
giving – knowledgeable clients really giving these – for the industry. So we would
sort of hear presentations by the contractors. We would hear about sort of some of the
science, strategic science, issues they were trying to pursue, the things they were
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trying to do. And we would sort of advise or we, you know, as best we could, you
know, what sort of directions they should be going in.
Did you have a view yourself on the Sellafield site from a geological point of view as
a suitable –
I never formed a strong view myself. I felt that the grounds for – that it was a
plausible site, was actually quite strong. It was a plausible place to [do] it. There
were clearly some geological issues which needed to be addressed. And almost any
site will have geological issues. I learnt one very important thing, which I’ve – which
I’ve benefited from enormously ever since, is the idea at the time in all sorts of
contexts was for environmental societal issue or a hazards issues – or a very common
claim in research proposals at that time was if you do more science you’ll reduce the
uncertainty. And I learned that it’s usually the opposite. The more science you do,
the more complicated the system seems to be and the more uncertainty, or the better
you – it’s not that there’s more uncertainty but you discover there’s more uncertainty
than you really thought. And that’s very commonly true. So it’s certainly the case in
almost all the nuclear waste repository sites I know round the world that when you
start to look in detail you find the system was more complicated than you thought it
was and therefore the questions start to mount up and the uncertainty increases. And
you have to deal with that to, you know, assess the site properly. And so that old
argument that scientists will often – you’d much less – you rarely hear these days is
I’m going to do this research ‘cause I’m going to reduce the uncertainty. That – you’d
hear that much less often these days.
You said that Nirex then went into kind of abeyance and then became significant
again in the mid 2000s, is that –
Yeah.
We may as well take the story on.
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Yeah. Nirex – I sort of – I didn’t really have anything to do with the British
programme after leaving the Nirex Science Council [Council Panel] and I really
watched it at afar without being involved. In fact very little happened. I think Nirex
must have been reduced to about a third of its size. So it had a programme but it was
a sort of an on hold programme and since the governments of the day were not really
making any decisions and sort of preferring this, you know, to leave this alone, this
whole issue, really very little happened. Now I don’t know when CoRWM was
created, which is the Committee of Radioactive Waste Management, probably 2007
but I’m not great on dates, I must admit. But there was a point at which the – this
needed to be – the politicians realised this really did need to be addressed and they
changed the strategy. Nirex was disbanded, the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency
was created and some of the former employees from Nirex are now working for the
radioactive waste management division of the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency.
And they’ve built – and they’ve certainly changed their ethos and ways of doing
things and have expanded. So NDA are now responsible for nuclear waste in the UK.
They [the UK Government] created something called the Committee of Radioactive
Waste Management and they specifically put social scientists and political scientists
and lawyers as well as natural scientists on that committee and they had somebody
from Greenpeace on it. So this was a very intentional idea of making sure that the
tent was big and that all the stakeholders who had views on this were included. And
CoRWM was created, I think by the last Labour government, and it’s still in
operation. And it’s an independent committee which comments on, you know, the
nuclear waste issue. Out of that was born the idea of volunteerism. So now the
official policy is, we find communities who are interested in or willing to – for a
radioactive waste depository to be put in their area. We then – so we put that first,
these people who want to – are happy about this. That’s the way that Sweden and
Japan and Finland have all gone, to volunteerism. And then when we’ve got a
community which says, yes, we’re interested, and maybe there are some benefits for
that community if they say of one kind or another, then the area’s explored for its
geological prospectivity, if you like, for having a depository. And that’s the current
situation.
And are you still advising on this?
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I worked on a small panel for the chief scientist of DEFRA, Howard Dalton, who
sadly died a couple of years ago. We were looking at the work of CoRWM from a
technical point of view. So I did that. And now I’m on the technical advisory
committee for the NDA on this issue. So I’ve been – I’m now into a sort of advisory
group, which again – a bit different from Nirex. This is much more advising NDA on
their – mostly on their technical strategy for R&D.
Meaning what?
Well, what do we know about – what are the technical issues which are still up for
questions, what are the things we don’t know or where are the gaps, where’s the –
where are the – what’s affecting the risk. But we do advise on other aspects. We
advise on how NDA interact with higher education. We advise on how they – more
from a science perspective, how they might engage – and outreach and engagement
with the public and with policymakers. So we advise on those sorts of things from a
technical science perspective. And so I’m involved in that. And still – yeah, I mean,
we – in a couple of weeks I’ve got a meeting in London of that committee. But in
between of course, just to complete the story, I did quite a lot of work based here with
a nuclear agency in the United States on aspects of Yucca Mountain, the Nevada test
site, where the US were thinking of putting their repository. And then I’ve worked for
quite a long time in Japan with the Japanese nuclear programme.
And for example, in terms of the American site, what do you advise in terms of sort of
geological understanding about whether or whether not this ought to be used as a
repository?
Well, our advice is – that really starts into this whole area now of probalistic risk
assessment. And I think our job is not actually to – I think the job of the scientists in
this context is not to provide advice on policy, it’s to provide the information which –
the evidence and information which allows the decision maker, i.e. the political
structure, to make the decisions. And that’s the job. And so if you’re in a nuclear –
somewhere like Yucca Mountain, you want to know what are the things that could
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cause you problems, make radioactivity leak to the surface, poison ground waters
farmers use for extraction to irrigate their groups. What are the circumstances where
unacceptable amounts of radioactivity leak out and cause environmental harm. And
that’s really a matter of risk assessment. So you’re really now into the area of
probabilities, ‘cause you can never – almost never say that anything’s absolutely
certain or absolutely safe. So you’re looking for sort of regulatory thresholds which
say what’s the acceptable level of radioactivity that the public should be exposed to in
the future. Given that this is the acceptable level of radioactivity they’re exposed to,
what are the circumstances which could exceed that and how likely are those
circumstances. And if the regulations then go on to say that we’re really not worried
about that risk if the risk falls beneath some threshold, like one death in a million
years or – whatever the number is, then one’s satisfied the regulation and it’s deemed
to be safe because the likelihood of something bad happening is so small that we’re
not – we’re going to say that we’re happy with that situation. That’s the game
actually of all nuclear waste programmes actually is to inform policymaking but it’s
actually to demonstrate – and actually demonstrate isn’t really the right word to use at
all. It’s to estimate as far as you possibly can what the chances are of exceeding
regulatory thresholds.
I see, thank you.
So you’re not trying to demonstrate – it’s the point I’m making. You’re not trying to
demonstrate it’s safe because that would be a politicisation, wouldn’t it, because one’s
trying to demonstrate that whether or not you exceed thresholds that are prescribed by
law.
[53:38]
Thank you. And to what extent at Bristol, perhaps even before, were you involved in
advising mining companies, that sort of work?
Not much actually. I did a – played around. I had a couple of PhD students in Bristol
who did mining sort of – mining projects. They were both people from the mining
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industry and they did projects on volcanoes and ore deposits in Fiji – one in Fiji and
one in Sierra Leone. And – ooh, somebody at the – oh, it’s … And yes, I – so I really
didn’t get involved in the mining industry in a big way until I got to Bristol actually. I
mean, I did a little bit but not very much. Oh, we did – oh, I’ve forgotten to – I’ve
forgotten that. Herbert and I did a little bit of work that turned out to be very
important for the nickel mining industry. So we did have – Herbert and I had some
interactions with some of the big mines in Western Australia, looking at their nickel
deposits, and the models we produced were able to explain what those ore bodies
looked like.
How? Could you go into that a bit?
Yeah, it’s quite a fun thing actually. I’d forgotten about that but it’s another nice
example of what Herbert and I did. So if you go to – well, firstly let’s start with the
observations. You go to Western Australia and you go to the big nickel mines, like
Kambalda, and what you observe is that the nickel ore body forms a long thin zone,
almost like a flat tube of material, which wobbles about a bit, but it’s like a sort of
tube like thing. And these nickel ore bodies occur at the bottom of lava flows and so
they are something to do with the dynamics of lavas. So the nickel ores are also
formed in lava flows which only formed at the early history of the earth. They don’t
form now. Very much hotter. These lava flows – the hottest lava we get on the earth
at the moment is about thirteen hundred degrees centigrade. These lavas were
probably around sixteen hundred degrees centigrade, so they were a sort of volcanism
which you only got in the early history of the planet. Because they were so hot they
were very fluid flows and we wanted to understand how those lavas would work. So
what we did was we – Herbert and I did some experiments where we took some wax,
a slab of wax, of a particular kind, immiscible with water. We created a slab of wax
on a low slope in the laboratory and then we poured hot water down the wax. And as
the hot water flows it starts to melt the wax and forms its own channel. We then knew
that the rills on the moon from the lavas have these same features, so we were able to
compare our little wax experiments with what happened on the moon where we saw
very similar things, so we could help explain features on the moon. And then we
worked out some – Herbert worked out some theory, which worked out how fast –
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given the temperature of the hot water, how hot it was, how fast would this channel
form. And these channels have very particular properties because if you imagine a
slope of wax, you’ve got this hot water going down it, it’s very hot at the beginning,
and because it’s hot it melts fast. So near the source the channel melts quicker. As
the flow goes away of course melting cools it down. So as it goes further its ability to
melt goes down, so the channel gets shallower downstream rather than deeper, so it’s
the opposite of river channels. So you expect it to be deeper near the source and
shallower further down. And that’s exactly what you see on the moon, these big
channels. So okay, how does this relate to nickel? We then started to talk with
geologists and we went to Kambalda and looked underground and talked to the
mining people and we realised that these very hot early lavas were flowing over
muddy rocks with a lot of sulphur in them. And so these very hot lavas would have a
lot of nickel in them but very little sulphur whereas the rocks they were flowing on
were mud, sulphurous muds. And so we thought, well, what must happen is that the
lava melts the floor, the sulphur comes into the lava. It then forms globules of nickel
sulphide, which then are very dense and they sink to the bottom of the lava channel
and they get trapped there and they form a layer at the bottom of the channel. And
then these layers will have the characteristics that we see in the mine. And we were
able to explain why it was that where the lava flows were thin on the side we saw
underneath the lava flows, the sediment. Where they were very thick in these
channels, they were much thicker and there was no sediment ‘cause the sediment had
disappeared by melting. And so it explained quite well why the exploration
geologists found, when they did a drill hole, if they came across a lot of sediment they
were not going to find any ore. If they came through a thicker lava with – and were
not finding sediment, there was a much better chance they were going to find some
ore bodies. So it explained these sort of exploration thing, if you like, that the
geologists – so that’s what we did. And I think that idea is still pretty well the sort of
accepted view of how these sort of ore bodies form.
So in that way it can guide them in their prospecting?
It can guide their – that’s – I mean, hopefully that helps them guide their prospecting,
where they would be expecting to find the ore and where they wouldn’t. And it would
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give them their sort of – the geological understanding – improved geological
understanding to sort of plan the mines and work out what was happening. So that
was – I guess that was a sort of major thing while I was at Cambridge that we did. Do
you fancy some lunch?
[End of Track 5]
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Track 6
Could you say something about the role of graduate students while at Bristol?
Or at Cambridge or …?
Oh yeah, sure.
That’s right. Yeah. When I got to Cambridge of course the first thing you – that
happens when you’re a sort of newly appointed academic is that you’re encouraged to
start supervising graduate students for PhDs, and of course I did that. And I think
over the course of my career I must have supervised over – I think it’s over sixty PhD
students. And they’ve really played an enormous role in the success of the science
I’m associated with. I mean, some of the students have been sort of absolutely
outstanding and of course have made their own independent science careers. So while
I was at Cambridge I was lucky enough to have several really sort of brilliant young
students and they really played a big role in getting some of the science done and also
developing some of the sort of new ideas that we had. So – and that kept going when
I got to Bristol and I’ve sort of again enjoyed a lot of very capable graduate students
and some of them have, as I say, gone on to make their own name. It’s – I think it’s
an interesting business about how you best supervise graduate students. I’ve sort of –
I’m not sure this is anything like design, but the tendency has been that when I’ve had
a graduate student, quite often I’ll include in the thinking about their project things
which I don’t necessarily know that much about. So obviously I will supervise them
in things that I do know about and the projects are designed so I can provide a lot of
advice but it’s quite – I think it’s quite nice sometimes to have aspects of their project
which neither I nor the graduate student know so much about and then of course they
can – if they’re bright they’ll go away and read up and find out about this area and I’ll
learn something from them and I have to get up to speed in it. And I think that’s
actually sometimes produced some of the more sort of creative research results.
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Are you able to perhaps pick one research student that would illustrate how that
relationship works in practice, almost how the division of labour works or how the
end result is a function of the two of you working together? Is there one –
Yes. I mean, I would say one – I mean, the graduate students who’ve been the best
ones are usually – by the time they’ve got towards the end of their thesis you’re sort
of starting to regard them as colleagues rather than students. They’re people who you
interact with and collaborate with. And, as I say, I’ve been very lucky to have some
very good ones that way. I mean, one of my – I suppose the – one of the most
successful graduate students has been a chap called Jon Blundy, who is now FRS and
professor in this department at Bristol, and he was an absolutely superb mapper. I
mean, he did tremendous geological maps when he was a student. And he also had a
flair for – he was not only a very sort of creative mind but he also started to get a real
interest in doing experimental petrology, something which I’ve never really done
much of, and during his PhD he did – he did a few – he did a geological map in the
Alps but he also did some experiments during his PhD, just to look at origins of
textures and something that I hadn’t up to that point been involved in. And so that led
to some very insightful results from his PhD. So a number of times I think during the
course I’ve had students who’ve gone away and done something sort of slightly
unexpected or – and something I’ve learnt from. So I think that’s really quite a
common experience I’ve had and of course it’s good when you’ve got students who
have got – who are, you know, independently minded. And I mean, one of my
students, David Pyle, who’s now professor at Oxford, when he was a PhD student
with me he did a bit of work which was really unrelated really to the main thrust of
his PhD and he did it independently and published a single author paper, which has
been absolutely a huge scientific hit. And it was just a very clever piece of work.
I’ve benefited from it. I wasn’t actually – I wasn’t involved in co-authoring, David
published this paper on his own when he was a – and that was – that then fed into a lot
of research which I’ve been doing to actually – doing subsequently, which related to
trying to explain the things he was – that he discovered and that was very stimulating
in that way. So there’ve been a number of occasions where that sort of thing has
happened.
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What was the area that he was focusing on and then what was this extra work that he
did?
Well, David was doing – David Pyle was working principally on looking at – in fact
this is a good example because David was one of a series of students I had working on
the island of Santorini, the Greek volcano. And he did some geological work, which
was pretty good, and his main project was actually to use radioactive isotopes, what’s
called the so-called uranium series of radioactive isotopes, which have relatively short
half lives. And he worked with – I co-supervised him with a man [Ivanovich] from
Harwell who was a real expert in these short lived isotopes. And we used the short
lived isotopes to try and find timings of events prior to eruption, what was the history
of these magmas prior to eruption. And just to give you an example, that if you take
an isotope like radium 226, which has got a half life of sixteen hundred years, in the
decay series from uranium, 235 I think it is, you find that in that decay series, if
there’s some event which means that – chemical event which means that radium and
uranium are separated by a chemical process, then for a while they’re out of
radioactive equilibrium. And because the half life of radium 226 is sixteen hundred
years it takes a few thousand years to get back to the point where there’s a balance
between the amount of uranium decaying to produce radium and the amount of
radium decaying to produce daughter products from that. And so this is work that
was – at the time was beginning to – people were getting very excited about this and
applying this methodology in all sorts of contexts. So I thought that David’s project –
I’d co-supervise it with the guy from Harwell, Ivanovich, and that he’d be able to
make these analyses and get the supervision on the isotopes from the person who’d be
much more expert than – was the expert. And so that really was his, you know, that
was the main strand of his PhD. And that was a very good piece of work but during it
he – he made some – he tested out an idea about the way in which volcanic ash layers
thin with distance from the volcano. They tend to be thicker near, at hand. And quite
a long time ago it was recognised that often this thinning seemed to be exponential.
Now what David did was he thought of a very clever way of turning rather
complicated maps of thickness, so not just thickness in a particular direction but the
whole pattern of the ash, and converting that into a form which could – was much
more general than anyone else had ever thought. So he thought of this sort of very
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clever way of doing it and then he plotted up all the data that he could find in the
literature and he found that this really worked extremely well. No matter how
complicated the pattern looked, if you reduced the data in the form that he’d
suggested then you really could make sense and you got this really very simple
relationship. And that was a really very clever thing to do. He published a paper on
his own. He – that has got highly cited and used ever since sort of – and, as I say,
he’s now a professor at Oxford in volcanology and has made himself into a very sort
of, you know, very, you know, one of these sort of outstanding earth scientists in the
UK, I think. And that was just a very clever thing to do. Interestingly, I don’t know –
you’d have to ask David what he had in mind, but it’s interesting that he was thinking
– he’d been working for his PhD on radioactive decay with half lives and some of the
stuff he did was thinking about this problem of ash layers in terms of decay constants
and half – not half lives but half distances and half sizes and things like that. So he –
you could almost say he took the theory of radioactivity and applied it. Now I’m not
sure whether you – actually that was what he was thinking about, but it’s sort of quite
interesting that that’s what he did. And then of course once he’d discovered that, the
question became, well, why does it – why do you get this very simple relationship,
what’s the cause of that, and then that leads onto new science and new questions. So
that would be a good example.
[11:27]
Have you ever had research students who sort of challenge your own developed ways
of thinking about volcanoes or approaches to studying them? In other words, they
move away from you almost during the process of …
Yes. I mean, I think the – I’m not sure I’ve ever really had – I’ve had students
who’ve challenged or got their own ideas, absolutely. That’s true. But it’s never
really led to any sort of conflict because if they’ve got the arguments and they’ve got
the evidence and they’ve got some new way of looking at it then, if it’s more
compelling arguments than perhaps I had made at some previous occasion and come
to some different conclusion, then that’s – I’m quite happy with that. I mean, in fact
one of my current PhD students at Bristol has done just that. We made some
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suggestions sort of twenty years ago about certain aspects of volcanic ash layers,
about how they originated, and we were putting forward ideas which were really at
the time different to previous – what people had thought previously. And we thought
our explanation was definitely – the arguments were much – the evidence was much
stronger for our explanation. And then that gradually became the sort of paradigm.
And one of my most recent PhD students, who’s still here in Bristol, she has actually
shown that it’s somewhere in between these two actually [laughs]. So the end
members – what we said is not quite right and what the people twenty years ago had
been saying isn’t really quite right and actually it’s a sort of – the truth is somewhere
in between. And that’s absolutely fine. So those sorts of things do happen. I’ve –
yes, I mean, I’ve really never had a sort of big sort of – I mean, all PhD students have
very different personalities and, you know, you obviously get the odd one who
struggles for one reason or another, or finds it difficult. I don’t think I’ve ever had
sort of a scientific clash with a student, partly because, as I say, I’m sort of quite
happy to accept if they’ve got sort of new evidence or new ways of thinking about
things and that might be better than what was done before.
[14:19]
Thank you. In relation to David Pyle, you mentioned Santorini. It reminded me to
ask you about a conference, which I think you attended, which was organised by
Colin Renfrew on –
Oh yeah, right, yes, yes.
I wonder whether you could – part of the reason for asking is that, as you know, I’ve
interviewed Mike Bailey and he tells the story of this conference. So I wonder
whether you could tell the story of that conference from your point of view.
Yes. I wonder which one it was, ‘cause there were two Santorini conferences. I think
it was the one – do you know which one he was thinking of?
Ah no. I didn’t realise there were two.
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Yeah, there were two. I think it was probably the same one that I was – that – yes.
No, I think that was very – I remember that being a really interesting conference. And
of course it was very interdisciplinary, so they had people who were art historians,
archaeologists, anthropologists, volcano people like me and geochemists. There was
a huge diversity of types of people there so it made it very interesting. And of course
the time that Mike was involved was – that was the time when the big dating
controversy about the eruption was still very much around. I mean, I’m not sure it’s
actually ever gone away actually but at the time it was a big – regarded as a huge
controversy about what the date was and the dating methods.
Do you have memories of Mike at that conference?
A little bit because I remember his talk on the oak trees, the Irish oaks and the tree
rings and the carbon dating that he did, and that was obviously a very important set of
observations and input into the, you know, into the arguments that were going on at
the time.
[16:15]
Thank you. Now I think we’ve got to the point where we’ll be going to Montserrat
and I think the question is how did that begin, what is the origin of that work?
Yeah. I mean, yes, well, it was the eruption of course that was the origin. At the time
I was – 1995, I was – largely my main field area was the Andes and Chile and I had a
couple of PhD students working there and a couple of – and another couple of PhD
students working on – just started on other topics. And the eruption started in July
1995 and I sort of read about it on the news. And so I wasn’t really involved in the
eruption much in the first few months. I didn’t go out there. And then I was asked,
with a colleague called Willy Aspinall, who’s now one of my major sort of
collaborators, to go out to form a sort of small audit commission on the state of the
observatory and the monitoring of the volcano and to advise government on, you
know, where they, you know, what they would do, not so much about the volcano
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because we were going there really to say, you know, how do you – how should we –
the island had no scientific infrastructure and when the eruption started various
science groups came in and there was really a lot of conflict around between the
different science groups, which was concerning the governor of the time and the chief
minister of the island. And they thought that they would have Willy and I come out
and talk – and do a sort of quick trip. So we did – so this was January ’96, we both –
Willy and I went out. We stayed there for a few days. We talked to the chief scientist
of the time, a chap called William Ambeh from the Seismic Research Centre in
Trinidad. We got a sort of flavour of the tensions that were there and we realised that
there were real problems because the island had no scientific infrastructure to speak of
before the eruption. It was pretty clear it was a very serious evident with – and
potentially very dangerous, that there really needed to be a full, you know, a well
established well equipped capable competent observatory there to monitor the volcano
and give advice to the government. Now Willy had already been out. Willy had gone
out in ’95 so he was sort of more familiar with the situation than I and I think I was
brought in just to give a wider view about volcanoes and volcanology and things. So
out of that it really became very apparent that help was needed and then in a rather ad
hoc way people from Bristol, particularly my PhD students, started – and myself
started to go out there and started to work with the observatory team.
[20:01]
Before you go on, could you just say what you – say in detail what you found when
you went out on this initial visit? When you say there were science groups here and
there were tensions, what do you mean? What was actually happening? What did
you see happening there?
I think – the difficulty is that I now know so much more about what happened at that
stage than I did then, I’m not sure it’s very easy for me to put myself back into what I
would have said. If it had been coming back to Heathrow or Gatwick on, you know,
January 20th
, or whenever I came back, and you’d asked me that question, I’m sure
my answer would not be the same as I’m going to give now, because there’s an awful
lot of hindsight and new information that’s emerged subsequently. But I think we
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certainly saw – fairly quickly got the following idea, that – the only scientific
organisation in the region was based in Trinidad, at the University of the West Indies,
the Seismic Research Unit, and they had come in to monitor the volcano. And
somehow or other, and the somehow or other is still not entirely clear, the US
Geological Survey team were invited in at the same time. And these two scientific
enterprises clashed in a pretty serious way for a whole variety of reasons including
personal chemistry, including the fact that the scientists from the United States were
well paid, well supported. The resources for the people from Trinidad were much
more limited. It was also different in perspective. There was – the US GS people had
just been involved in – they have something called the Volcano Disaster Assistance
Programme, where if there’s a volcanic eruption around the world the US GS will
bring a sort of like a SWAT team who will come in, usually for a relatively short time,
help the locals, put seismometers out, give them advice and experience and help them
get started or help to monitor the crisis, but they can never stay for a long period of
time. And this group had come in and they’d just come back from Mount Pinatubo in
1991, where there was an absolutely catastrophic eruption and they knew about
Mount St Helens. So they on the whole were extremely nervous. There were even
some who wanted to leave the island immediately, they thought it was so unsafe.
Some among the US GS?
Some amongst the US GS thought the situation just so dangerous they wanted to
personally leave the island. The people from Trinidad on the other hand were led by a
man called William Ambeh, who was from Cameroon, an African geophysicist with
seismological expertise, and he had a very much more – well, firstly he’d never been
involved in a volcanic crisis so in a sense he was much less experienced, but he felt
that there wasn’t nearly as much of a difficulty. And so there was a clash on science,
there was a clash on perspectives about what the eruption was doing and of course the
government, the British governor and the chief minister were getting essentially rather
potentially conflicting advice. So that was definitely in the air about just how
dangerous the situation was. And then you – into that mixture you have to put in
colonial politics. Montserrat wanted to be independent prior to the eruption. There
was quite an independence movement, you know, we’ll become an independent
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nation, we’ll cut our ties with Britain. And of course the eruption really put a
complete stop to that as a possibility, but of course at the time they weren’t
necessarily realising that. They were getting sort of – the message they would prefer
to have heard was that it wasn’t as dangerous as people had said, you know. And
they’d got the scientist William Ambeh, who was a black man, at that time unusual to
have a black guy as a head of a sort of major research institution. He was highly
regarded and looked up to by many of the locals. So they preferred – in a way there
were some who preferred to believe that story, whereas the governor of the island was
being told by these American scientists who’d been experienced in other volcanic
disasters that this is really a very bad situation, you know, and even wanting to leave
the island. So this sort of, you know, all this sort of rather toxic mixture was
converging [laughs] all at the same time, so it made it a very awkward situation. I
mean, this is not what we were there to advise on. We were there more just to advise
what sort of observatory you would like to have, you know, what was fit for purpose.
And we of course talked to William and one or two of the US GS – there was one US
GS person there when we got there but they’d basically left by that time. So it was a
very – it was very awkward – it was a very difficult beginning to the crisis actually,
very dangerous in some ways because really actually nobody did know what was
going on at the volcano.
[26:21]
Yes. What were the two groups doing? What were William Ambeh’s group actually
doing and what were the US GS actually doing in terms of –
Well, they were doing things very similar. I mean, scientifically there wasn’t really
much distance. I mean, they were looking – they’d got seismographs out. They were
sort of starting to make some measurements of defamation, sort of the defamation of
the land, by using lasers and things like that. They’d got seismology – the little
earthquakes that occur was the main thing. So scientifically they were not, you know,
not really far apart. I mean, it was just – it was more a difference of perspective, I
suppose.
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[27:02]
And so we can imagine it, could you describe what the volcano looked like and then
where these scientists are in relation to it? ‘Cause we might imagine that they’re
standing right on the edge of it dipping things in. So what did the erupting volcano
actually look like and then where were the scientists in relation to it? Where were
they putting their pieces of equipment?
Well, they put them on the flanks of the volcano. It’s a totally different sort of
volcano from like Hawaii. I mean, it’s very viscous magma, which is enormously
stiff and also capable of building up huge pressures. And of course this was the big
concern, that there would be a really very large explosive eruption. And it was – it
was – so it was potentially really quite dangerous and so people wouldn’t really go
that often near the volcano at all. I mean, it was – and people did climb up and look at
what was going on. And – but you basically put the seismometers on the ground and
you find some way – there was no fixed observatory so they had an observatory in
Plymouth, the main town, which was only three kilometres from the crater, and that
was I think – certainly when I went there I think that was acknowledged to be far too
close for comfort. And they’d moved by the observatory – I think by the time we got
there they’d actually moved the observatory to – further away from the volcano, away
from the main town. So essentially it was – the main measurements that were being
made at the time were the seismic measurements and the laser – electrodistance
measuring, where you have a reflecting prism on the volcano and you have a laser
light which you shine to it and get it back. And then if there are movements you tell
from the phase change what the movements are. So you can see these very small but
very significant, you know, millimetres per, you know, per week or less, very tiny
movements, but you can see these tiny movements happening and you know that
there’s – the ground is swelling. So that was the sort of information they were getting
at that time. They would also have been getting a bit of gas data, sulphur dioxide
coming off the volcano. They were starting to measure the gases too.
[29:30]
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What were your personal feelings about the – about your safety or the safety of the
people near the volcano when you were just there for the first time?
Er, I think that I didn’t have a sense at that time that we were moving – by the time I
got there, I think the – well, I won’t go into the details of the eruption but basically the
eruption started in June 1995 and really that very uncertain and dangerous period was
probably in July, August, September 1995. By the time we’d got to January ’96,
when I first went out there, nothing untoward had – a big cataclysmic event had not
happened. And by that time there was the very start of something we call dome
growth, which is when this very viscous lava with no gas in it squeezes out and forms
a dome on the floor of the crater, and that had started to happen. And that was
somewhat reassuring because that sort of activity is certainly, you know, if the lava’s
getting to the surface it’s losing its gas and it’s being able to squeeze out without any
gas in it, then it’s lost the ability to explode. And so I think – at that time it was
coming out very slowly so I think the people by that time had started to get a little bit
more comfortable that this wasn’t going to sort of immediately go into some sort of
Krakatoan like cataclysm, that it was sort of moving towards one of these lava dome
eruptions. So I think the sort of anxiety that they likely – I mean, I wasn’t present in
those first few weeks, but the sort of anxieties and uncertainties they had were
probably dissipated a bit by then. And these sort of early tensions – the US GS people
had largely gone and one or two of them came back to help and were sort of – were
able to, you know, sort of mend bridges. And there were a couple of people,
Americans, who sort of, you know, made it their business to mend bridges with the
people from Trinidad and work with them, and that was sort of beginning to work sort
of quite well.
And finally on this initial visit, what did you sense of the sort of reaction of local
people to what was happening? What did you see of that in just going around where
you were?
Well, I think that was – there was still a huge amount of turmoil and uncertainty and
very different reactions from different people, people who were sort of terrified over
to people who were, you know, sort of didn’t think, you know, they thought – they
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weren’t convinced that anything terrible was going to happen and they couldn’t
understand necessarily why they were being evacuated. I mean, a lot of the issues
locally were not so much to do with the volcano. I mean, the British government had
set up evacuation camps in the north of the island and old hurricane shelters and
they’d evacuated a lot of people to these. I mean, these shelters were very primitive.
And because the volcano was still threatening, it was still going on, these people
couldn’t move back and so they were living in really very dire conditions actually. I
mean, really, really quite shocking in some ways. You know, sort of churches
absolutely full of just bed after bed next to each other and people there living with
their families for, you know, literally weeks and months. And so the local politics
was, you know, you could see quite rightly, they were complaining about the British
government not providing adequate support and help, complaining about these
conditions. And so that – a lot of the discussion locally was more about that in a way.
People had been taken out of, you know, the very dangerous regions had been –
Plymouth was still open actually at that point so – on the east coast of the volcano
some people had been evacuated. And so it was still – it was a bit of a calm before
the storm because during the rest of 1996 the volcano gradually ramped up in activity,
became more and more active, albeit very slowly, and so it was like a ratchet, you
know, the population were continually being stressed and the situation was getting
more and more difficult slowly with time and that made it really difficult for them.
[34:34]
So then what happened next? You came back from this initial visit.
Yeah, I – I saw this as a fantastic opportunity to get involved the sort of applied side
and some of my PhD students were going very relevant work and I basically talked
with them about it and they agreed to come and able doing some of the monitoring
and work. And I came along and supported some of the monitoring activities and
started doing measurements and observations and beginning to help support the
observatory work and trying to keep up, you know, if you like, keep up with the
volcano in terms of what it was doing. And the PhD students sort of shifted – at least
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two of them shifted their – what they were doing for their PhD [laughs] quite
markedly at that point and they started working on Montserrat.
And who were you speaking to in the government – who was inviting you to go out
initially?
I think it was the old ODA and – the ODA, Overseas Development Agency, before it
became DIFID, were providing a lot of the money. And the Foreign Office were in
charge of the island in terms of security but the money, because it was emergency
disaster relief, came from the ODA. So that was where the money was coming from
to support the observatory activities.
And how did your work with this island develop then from this point onwards?
Well, the first three years until ’96 – well, I suppose first two years really, till early
’98, that was a period of dramatic developments of the volcano one way and another,
scientifically fascinating terms of emergency, quite troubling, you know, there was
continued escalation of the activity. We established a sort of – the Montserrat volcano
observatory, in which the duties of doing the work were shared effectively by the
Seismic Research Unit from Trinidad, people from the British Geological Survey and
ourselves from Bristol principally, and one or two other British universities came in
and helped from time to time. And so by the combination of those personnel being,
you know, sort of all – ‘cause the main point is all of those organisations have other
jobs. I mean, they’re, you know, we weren’t – [laughs] it was going to be quite a
while before one would create sort of permanent posts of a director, for example. So
over those first two and a bit years we rotated the directorship of the observatory
between five people, me being one of them, two colleagues from Trinidad being other
ones, Willy Aspinall being another one and somebody from the British Geological
Survey being the fifth. So because we all had day jobs, you know, working in the
university, working at the BGS or working in Trinidad, we’d typically come on the
island for somewhere like five or six weeks at a time in a rota system and then during
the time on the island I would be director of the observatory and work with the
technicians and the scientists to keep the volcano monitored. So that was an
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extraordinarily – for me an extraordinary experience because we were in the middle of
a really major volcanic disaster and emergency, we were trying to run a volcano
observatory in very trying circumstances in all sorts of ways. You know, obviously
from different institutions, different countries, working together, local technicians,
Montserratian technicians and admin staff in the observatory. It was actually in a sort
of bungalow, it wasn’t really a proper observatory at all, so a lot of these
seismometers and the ground defamation and things that we had to measure were
being set up. We had helicopter support, so we would be able to fly and look at the
volcano, get near the volcano quickly and get out quickly if we needed to, set the
instruments up, make the instruments work. At the same time the observatory’s task
was not just to monitor the volcano but was to give almost on a daily – a day to day
basis, advice to the local authorities and the civil protection section. And we were
giving advice both to the British governor and the chief minister of the island and
talking to the civil protection and engaging with the public on a small island to
explain to them what was happening and – what we were thought was happening, you
know, and also when decisions like evacuation came, what the sort of science basis
would be to inform an evacuation decision. So this was all going on simultaneously,
so it was a – it was a very unique and remarkable sort of political science, you know,
not an – I mean, there was a science opportunity but there was a sort of real, real
serious emergency going on where we were sort of contributing and interacting.
[40:28]
Where was the bungalow? Can you sort of locate –
Yeah, the bungalow was above the old golf course in a river valley, so when we
looked at the volcano we were about eight kilometres away from the volcano,
roughly, looking up at it. We were sort of on the wrong side of the volcano because
of various topographic constraints, so we got a view of the volcano but in the – when
there wasn’t any cloud about we were not getting the greatest view. We relied
therefore a lot on helicopter going up and – going down to the other side of the
volcano in the evacuated zone and seeing what was happening. There was a lot of
cloud about, which didn’t help, so that was a difficulty, ‘cause sometimes the volcano
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was just shrouded in cloud all the – for long periods. So we relied a lot on the
instruments, the seismometers and the defamation data, to try and make sense. And
so we were – we’d be in this sort of bungalow, which had a nice swimming pool and,
you know, basically it was a sort of 24/7 service. I mean, we had a night duty and the
chief scientist would get rung up if something was happening at the volcano. And
there was a lot happening from time to time. And it was very sort of makeshift really.
Where did you live when you were on duty for five or six weeks?
We would live in local villas quite close at hand. We’d rent them and then, you
know, sort of had cars and drove into the observatory.
And you said that you were running this observatory under trying circumstances.
What were the sort of key difficulties in this particular context?
Well, the key difficulties, which is no – it’s really no different to any other emergency
from a natural hazard or volcano, was that fundamentally you’ve got an island of
finite size, the dangerous area of the volcano means that two thirds of the island
population have to evacuate, who are ultimately – well that – as I say, that happened
progressively. You have a situation where the north of the island isn’t big enough for
the people to be so that has to – a lot of people have to be relocated outside the island,
go back to Britain or go to Britain or North America. You’ve obviously got
tremendous tensions, which are between some of the islanders, who had a really
strong belief in wanting to keep the island going and wanting to survive this adversity,
and they would be, you know, every square inch that the scientists thought –
identified as being dangerous meant more of their island was no longer accessible and
more people had to move out. So clearly where we – where our – I mean, we didn’t –
what we would do would be we would say where we thought the dangerous areas
were and then it was up to the government to decide on what they did about that, did
they evacuate people completely, did they evacuate them during the day, was it a sort
of in and out, or did they completely evacuate. So obviously the bit – the wider the
footprint of the area that you think is dangerous, the worse it is for the island. And so
quite naturally some of the locals would question whether we’d put the island – we
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were being too safe or calling an evacuation, you know, the government was calling –
based on our advice, calling an evacuation prematurely or unnecessarily. And then
there was the other side, people being very frightened and wanting to be out of the
volcano. And so there was a lot of, you know, sort of different views and different
perceptions about these issues. And as a generalisation, the British government was
more risk averse than the local government, ‘cause they didn’t want to have people
killed while they were responsible. It’s a British dependent territory. The local
people, particularly the administration, was interested in keeping the economy of the
island going, keeping it going as a nation, you know, sort of island nation, protecting,
you know, sort of the – so they – every – as I say, every square foot they could keep
to do things in, whether it’s businesses or people’s homes or not having to evacuate
people, for them would be better, so they were much less, you know, on the whole
they would be less risk averse. So that inevitably led to political issues and of claims
that Britain wasn’t doing enough and anti-colonial nationalist sentiments that would
be around in some people. I mean, most – I would say, you know, many
Montserratians are very proud people and they’re, you know, wonderfully pleasant
people to be around, but there were those sort of tensions in the air.
[46:40]
How did local people protest when they thought that the government were
overreacting on the advice of scientists? How – I mean, how did you know that they
were protesting? What did you see?
Well, you – I mean, it’s like a – the – by the time, you know, during this period, ’96
and ’97, there was a sort of – it’s a small island, it’s like a large village almost, so
everybody sort of knows everybody else. And in the Caribbean, you know, there’s –
there are all sorts of ways. I mean, you’d go to the rum bar shop or – we were almost
daily interviewed by the local radio station and people loved – in that part of the
world they love call in programmes, you know, with people, so a sort of ask the
scientists sort of thing or ask the politicians. So they’d have us in the ZJB studio,
that’s the local radio station, and they’d interview us and talk about what we thought
was going on in the volcano and cross question us and then people would ring in, the
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locals would ring in and make their views known or discuss some points. And so it –
we’d have open meetings between the scientists and the public to, you know, for – to
exchange information and help them understand what was going on or what we
thought was going on. So there were lots and lots of mechanisms for doing that. We
had a local newspaper called the Montserrat Reporter, which came out every week, I
think, and that had an interesting column called ‘Jus Wondering’, which was a – and
it’d be all about politics and rumours and who’d done what to whom on the island, so
some things – nothing to do with the volcano but it was a sort of slightly gossipy
satirical thing and you could sort of – very entertaining to read. Everybody used to
read their Just Wondering and [laughs] you know, you would read that and you would
get a sort of flavour of the sort of – the talk around town, as it were. So that was very
– I mean, I must say that the Montserratian people were never sort of really
antagonistic. I mean, some of – there would be a few hot heads and people who
would make their views known very strongly, but they were never – as I say, never
really antagonistic at all. And so I think all the expat scientists like myself working
there always felt pretty comfortable with, you know, being in the community naturally
and working with them. But it was a very, you know, it was a very stressful situation
for everybody and so inevitably sort of emotions would run high occasionally,
particularly if people were being told to evacuate their homes and they really want to
be sure that it’s really necessary to do that.
[49:41]
In these radio call in programmes, or in the open meetings with the public, how did
you translate the sort of – the detailed science that presumably you were working on
in the observatory into sort of communication with the public about the – how did you
talk to local people about the volcano?
Yeah. Well, we – we developed methods by trial – to some extent trial and error,
because on the whole scientists are not trained in communication to the public. We
were sort of basically amateurs in some respects. We had to learn on the job about
having not, you know, avoiding jargon wherever you possibly could. At the same
time we thought that it was really important that they knew some of the
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volcanological jargon and that, you know, they knew what a pyroclastic flow was and
what it could do to people if they were around. So we did need to explain some of the
very basics. And it’s a very well educated community so people caught on pretty
quickly and in fact a lot of the locals became sort of amateur volcanologists
themselves and were sort of arguing about pyroclastic flows and volcanic bombs and
things, you know, amongst themselves. So – but we tried where we could to use – we
found using a number of mechanisms – I mean, getting help from the locals to
communicate. I mean, the message would often be perhaps more effective if there
were local people like the village – maybe one of the priests, for example, or perhaps
a school teacher or one of the local staff might be able to say things in ways that, you
know, somebody from the UK couldn’t. He had some colleagues from Trinidad, who
were very good, and they’d sometimes talk. And we’d talk and we’d – so there, you
know, using those different means of communication. We’d use analogies, which we
found useful. For example, when the – one of the features of the eruption is the rate at
which the lava dome builds up and rather than using facts and figures we’d say, well
actually, every second there’s something like the volume of car is added to a lava
dome, and by the end of the day you’ve got 10,000 extra cars. That’s how fast it’s
growing. And so we tried to use straightforward analogies that would be familiar to
people to explain what we – what was happening.
Were there things that you could show local people, I don’t know, plots or graphs or
images? Was there anything that you could show them?
Yeah, we tried – we had leaflets in the supermarkets. We had a video produced by the
International Association of Volcanology, which was a sort of about – made for the
public and made for volcanic hazards and risks, and we showed those at schools and
community halls and to individual groups and showed them the film and showed what
a pyroclastic flow could do to people. So we tried a lot of different tactics of
outreach. And quite a lot of emphasis on schools because often they take – they’re
more – in some respects they can be more – schoolchildren can be more receptive and
then they tell their parents and things. So we tried all sorts of different methods to
explain what the volcano was – what was happening at the volcano.
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[53:48]
Early on we had an awful lot of media around. I mean, huge amounts of foreign
media to deal with as well, who often are very intrusive.
In what way?
Well, they just want as much possible time as they can with you and they think, you
know, they’ve got to get their story out so they want it now, not tomorrow. And then
they don’t necessarily understand what’s happening except there’s a big volcano
going off and we had to deal with the problem that the media would often exaggerate
or sensationalise what was actually happening on the island. I mean, I was talking to
– I was on Montserrat about six weeks ago and I was talking to a local guy and he was
saying people – when he tells people in other Caribbean islands that he lives on
Montserrat, he said – he was saying that somebody was saying, ‘Well, does anybody
live there anymore?’ Or, you know, ‘You must be crazy,’ sort of thing. So that still
happens. And so this sort of outside perception was sort of distorted by the media at
the time, that this was a sort of time bomb waiting to go. And so we had to deal with
that.
How did you deal with that? How did you counter it?
Well, it’s very difficult to – I mean, I think the media is really very difficult to deal
with at times. I mean, they will interview you for long periods and then they will use
a very tiny little bit of what you say on their news clip. And it’s the bit that they
select which is telling their story, not the story you want to tell. So you’re always
under the – if you like, the tyranny of the editor of the – whether it’s a news
programme or a documentary, and of course loads of people wanted to do
documentaries on it. I mean, there’s umpteen Montserrat documentaries. Some are
very good and some are just sensationalised and really telling a story which isn’t
correct or true. So they do tend to be very intrusive, very persistent. You can
understand why that is with a journalist, but people are trying to get on with the job of
monitoring the volcano, they don’t want to be talking to journalists and be filmed by
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TV crews all the time so you have to sort of try and get a balance. On the other hand,
I mean, if it’s good journalism, and there were good journalists, they can be really
helpful and they can really get a message out. I mean, the radio station was absolutely
fantastic. I mean, they were really supportive, very balanced. They were a major
source of information for the local people. So talking on the radio in these call ins or
interviews was a really key part for the scientists’ role.
[57:01]
What did people used to call in with? What did they tend to ask when, you know,
local people calling in through this radio station, what did they tend to want to ask
the expert?
Ooh, it’s so diverse. I mean, it’s, you know, it might be asking about a particular
place, maybe that’s where they lived, what’s happening there. They might be asking
about some phenomena, why was there lightning last night, did you hear it roar. It
could be more sort of political, you know, if they felt that the place that was under
threat or had been evacuated wasn’t, you know, was actually safer. You know, they
might say, well, nothing’s happened there yet so why should we worry. Isn’t
everything happening on the east of the volcano so why should we be worried about
the north and the south west, you know, that sort of thing. And it came to – and of
course the thing at the volcano was – the way it erupted was that it would do not an
awful lot for quite long periods of time, like weeks where nothing very much from a
public point of view was happening. We knew there were things going on. And then
it would roar into action in a few hours or a day or two and there would be a sort of
major event. And so it was sort of punctuated. And of course in the quieter times
people were saying, well, this looks like it’s quietening down, doesn’t it, and it was
sort of to some extent in hope that it was. And so you had to deal with those sorts of
natural tendencies to be at the same time concerned but really wanting the thing to go
away and to get on with their lives or move back into their houses or start their
business again. So there were all these sort of conflicting emotions that were going
around and that would be in the local, you know, with the local people.
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[59:09]
And then finally on this earlier period, could you tell me about communication with
the two sort of political leaders, the British governor and the –
Yes, that’s right.
Yeah, well start with the British governor, yes.
Yeah. That was – we would often – in the height of the crisis we would likely see the
British governor almost – I wouldn’t say daily but maybe, you know, three or four
times a week, and particularly when something was brewing up at the volcano then
we’d be sort of seeing him on the phone or talking to him a lot. And he would – I
mean, he was a chap called Frank Savage and he was sort of really a wonderful
governor and I think handled the crisis very well, but it was a really difficult situation
for him, especially when there was – there were twenty people killed in ’97 in an area
they shouldn’t have been and he felt, I think, tremendous sort of responsibility for
those deaths, even though it was – actually people felt no – no, I don’t think anybody
would say that it was in any way related to his decisions. I mean, these were people
in an evacuated area, they shouldn’t have been there, but they were still killed. So we
did that. Now if I sort of fast track it a little bit forward, I’ve talked almost entirely
about these sort of first two years and as the two years from ’96 to early ’98 came, it
became clearer and clearer we needed an established volcano observatory, people
staffed with salaries who were there fulltime. This sort of rotation was clearly not a
long term way of doing things and rather ad hoc, having students from universities
and people from Trinidad and the odd American and French person coming in in a
very ad hoc way, wasn’t going to be a long term solution. So over that two years we
moved towards trying to establish a much more – well, essentially establish a sort of
permanent observatory. At the same time we realised the scientific advice needed to
be formalised in a much better way that we had. And of course if you’ve got five
chiefs at different times they can have different personalities and views and ways of
doing things, so it was really difficult for the governor, I think, and the chief minister
to cope with five different senior scientists coming in and then giving them advice in
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different ways. You know, that was clearly not the optimum way of doing things. So
we realised we had to establish a permanent – a much more permanent observatory
where the director would be there for perhaps a year or two, there’d be more
permanent staff. We realised there needed to be – scientific advice needed to be much
more formalised and structured, so we created a scientific advisory committee and
that was I think a big success because we – in ’96 we had a meeting in – end of –
sorry, I’ve got this wrong, end of ’97 we convened a scientific advisory – what we
now call the scientific advisory committee and we designed it by happenchance. We
– Bob May, who was the chief UK scientist at the time, had just come out with
guidelines about how scientific committees should work, advisory committees, and
we followed these guidelines and we created a new committee for giving advice to the
UK government and the Montserrat government in a formal way. I chaired that
committee for the first six years and we had senior scientists from the major
institutions, you know, Trinidad, the UK, British Geological Survey and so forth, and
we convened this scientific advisory committee, which could also work a bit offline.
[1:03:29]
And we then developed for the first time something really very pioneering, which is
largely attributable to Willy Aspinall. We started to do very structured formal risk
assessment based on probabilistic approach and we used expert elicitation judgement
methods to formalise our compiling of evidence and structuring it in a way which
took account of uncertainties. And that is the first volcanic eruption that’s ever –
where those methods have ever been applied and they’re now being copied in other
parts of the world, but we did it first on Montserrat and we’ve then had regular
meetings of the scientific committee doing the proper risk assessment, working with
the observatory and then providing this structured considered advice to the
government. And we’ve been doing that ever since.
And how is – could you go into detail about how that formal probabilistic sort of
document, if it is a document, how it looks, how it’s structured, the thing that they
get?
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Yes, it’s a – the thing they get, the deliverable, is always a report, assessing the
hazards of the volcano, the status of the volcano and assessing the risk. And it’s
based on a methodology which Willy has sort of used, from a Dutch mathematician
called Roger Cooke. And what we do is we have our scientific experts. We’re trying
to answer some usually pretty simple question. There’s a village eight kilometres
from the volcano, it’s got 500 people in it, the volcano is doing this, should we
evacuate that village or not. That’s the sort of question we were being asked. Now to
answer that question you then have to integrate all the scientific evidence that you
have at your disposal in order to assess the probability that something unpleasant will
happen to that village over a fixed time period, which we usually chose as six months.
And the way that you do that is you combine your empirical evidence, what’s going
on in the volcano, with – with modelling work, which is sometimes empirical,
sometimes more physics based, but basically you want to know if there’s something
happening in the volcano which is going to produce a deadly hot flow which goes into
the village. And you then look at all the factors which go into determining that
probability and you use all the evidence, and you use expert judgement, to work out
the probability density functions of – now that’s a bit of jargon, that. Basically we
want to know how certain – the things that are going to decide whether the flow gets
to the village or not have some uncertainty and we want to assess that uncertainty.
Once we’ve got that uncertainty there’s a range of possible values that we believe –
within which the true answer is located. And then for all the processes we have to –
all the things which are going to affect the parameters, affect that probability, we have
to work out that range of – how uncertain – what our most likely value is and what the
range is. We then combine all those through a method of computer modelling, which
is sometimes called Monte Carlo Ensemble. In other words, we sample all the
possibilities, the combinations of possibilities, we end up with a statistical likelihood
that this event will happen and if the event happens it will get to the village. And then
we present that as risk curves, which are either an individual risk, somebody in the
village, what’s their chance of – if they stay in this village for six months, what’s the
chance of them being killed. If it’s the whole village, the societal risk, what’s the
chance of the governor finding he’s got 300 dead people on his hands. And so we
calculate the risk and then we present the results of that risk assessment to the
governor and the chief minister and the decision makers and they look at it and say,
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wow, that’s pretty dangerous, we’re going to evacuate, or maybe it’s okay. I mean,
maybe the risk turns out to be low and therefore they don’t have to do anything. So
that’s the principle of it. We wait – our experts, all the experts on the panel, are
weighted according to a calibration. Every expert is regarded as a statistical
hypothesis. So you’re claiming to be an expert in geography, let’s say, okay, in some
branch of geography, and I want to know how expert you are, so I’m going to give
you a series of questions which test your expertise. But I don’t just want to test your
expertise, I want to test your ability to assess uncertainty in the natural world, so I’m
going to ask you some questions which test how well you know your subject but also
how good you are at assessing uncertainty, how, you know, how confident are you
that you’ve got the right answer. And that series of seed questions then creates your
calibration score and then when you do your real assessment you’re weighted
according to how well you’ve done in the calibration.
So each individual has a different – almost the status of their view gets a different
level according to –
How well they’ve done, yes, yeah.
So that changes report by report, does it, or is it established at the beginning and then
–
It’s usually – in this case it’s established at the beginning. There’s a case – there’s a –
well, I don’t want to go into details about this, but there is a case of whether you
should continually retest people ‘cause maybe they’ll improve.
That’s fascinating. So what, for example, was your rating as a –
I don’t know because Willy – this method gets everybody anonymous. I don’t know
how well I did. Willy Aspinall is the facilitator so he’s the only person who has
access to the information on how well people did, so it’s an anonymous process.
What do you remember of the questions though that you were asked?
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Oh yes. Well, we do this now with the students all the time, so, you know, and I’ll
give you a sort of trivial example to illustrate this thing. So I could ask you, how
many bottles of red wine were consumed in France in 2010, okay. That’s your
question. Now it could be that you’re a wine merchant and you know a lot about the
French wine industry and you’ve, you know, you know a lot about it and you actually
know that figure quite well, you think you know it pretty well. So you’d give a pretty
good answer and you’d probably have a narrow band. You could be a wine merchant
who thinks they know a lot about the subject but actually don’t and they give
completely the wrong – they’re very opinionated and they give completely the wrong
answer and even their bands don’t hit the right answer. Or you could be somebody,
more likely in this case, who doesn’t know very much about it but knows there’s sort
of maybe seventy million French people and maybe they drink a bottle of wine every
month or week or whatever it is and then they say, well, I’ll do a very rough
calculation, you know, seventy million Frenchmen drinking red wine, I’ll allow them
to drink, you know, some of them are children, some of them are old people, but I’ll
say that on average they drink a bottle of wine every month, or some figure. And I’ll
come up with a number. But then of course I don’t really think I’m very confident in
that because – and I try and think, what’s the least it could be. You know, is it
feasible that the average Frenchman only drinks one bottle of red wine per year or do
they drink 10,000 – does each Frenchman drink 10,000. Well obviously they don’t
drink 10,000. So you can sort of come down and down and down each way until you
come to some numbers you feel, well, really that’s possible. So that’s your
uncertainty and then your central value. So that’s what it’s doing, it’s your ability to
make that assessment, use your own internal knowledge and do it. And that then
answers those sorts of – obviously the real questions are sort of more technical
scientific.
So were you asked questions about volcanology?
Yes, that’s right. You’d be asked questions about your field of expertise.
And how were your answers then assessed, you know?
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Well, Roger Cooke, who – this – from Delft University who has developed this
method, has a sort of – essentially an algorithm. It’s a statistical question. I mean,
you’re compared against a statistical hypothesis. And so Willy uses this method and
we’ve used it ever since.
It’s fascinating ‘cause I think intuitively the public would imagine that you have
experts in volcanology and you just have those experts and whatever they said, based
on their observations, would be accepted, that there wouldn’t be this sort of external
sort of rating.
Yeah, that’s right. And that’s the interesting question because what happens in this is
fascinating. I mean, I’m sure this is much more to do with psychology than anything
else, but the fact is you do get very eminent people who are highly opinionated and
they don’t – sometimes they don’t do very well in this, because they’re so
opinionated, they’re so confident that they’ve got the right answer, that they’re going
to say it’s this and I’m very confident and it’s a very narrow band –
Which means their score would go down, which means that their opinion then gets a
lower weighting in the overall document.
Correct, that’s right, yeah. On the other hand, you don’t want – to get a decision, an
insight, you don’t want somebody who knows nothing at all and gives their – such a
large range, it could be anything from one to a billion and that’s of no – absolutely no
value for decision making. So they don’t score very well either in the sense that, you
know, the information they’re giving is really not very valuable, it’s not very
informed, it’s not very expert. So your optimum expert needs to be somebody who
has a really good knowledge of the subject so they’re quite likely to get somewhere
near the right answer and also has a really good feeling for the true uncertainties and
therefore they can give a range, which is good enough for decision making or
informing decision making but not so narrow that, you know, they’re not starting to
get into this opinionated category.
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What sort of a question might you have been asked about volcanology in order to be
rated in this way? What would have been a sort of typical question that –
Yes, you might have something like the number of earthquakes per hour in a volcano
prior to an explosion, built up from thirty per hour to, say, 200 per hour, two hours
before the eruption. And this is – and then you could quote it in the eruption. What
was the earthquake rated in the two hours, you know the earthquake rating, it was
increasing, that’s the earthquake rate in those two hours before the eruption. Okay?
That’s the question you might be asked. If you’re not a seismologist or don’t know
much about volcano earthquakes, that might be a pretty difficult question to answer.
And you might say, well, I think I’ll just sort of extrapolate – if you sort of thought
you were a bit of an expert and it seemed reasonable to extrapolate, you might say,
well, it’s 250 and 300. If you were very confident in that you’d give it a narrow band,
if you weren’t you would give it a wide band. There might be the real expert who
might be even the person who’d done that study and he knows exactly what the right
answer is, which is fine, or there could be somebody who didn’t do that study but
remembers the paper and said, you know, I sort of remember they actually went down
a bit so I’m going to give, you know, they don’t know the exact answer but they know
enough about the field. So you could get a whole spectrum of answers depending on
the person’s knowledge and expertise and intuition about those sorts of things.
[1:17:57]
Thank you. And I suppose we haven’t explored what you were learning about the
behaviour of a volcano by being in this position of –
Ah yeah, yeah.
Running an observatory, constantly looking at it.
That’s right. We’ve talked a lot about the management of the crisis and all those
aspects. The science was absolutely fantastic. I mean, of course it’s always difficult
to say that when you’re around a human tragedy, but the fact is that we were on one of
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the biggest eruptions of the last 100 years on the earth, it went on for fifteen years.
We had opportunities of observing completely new phenomena, making
measurements nobody else had ever made before and discovering a whole raft of
fantastic things about how volcanoes behave, to the extent that Montserrat is
probably, along with Mount St Helens, the most important scientific eruption that’s
happened in the last fifty years. And so that opportunity, you know, particularly for
PhD students and young post docs as well as myself, to actually witness the eruption,
be able to make the scientific studies which characterised what went on and they tried
to understand that, was an absolutely fantastic experience and we learnt just a
phenomenal amount of new science, new ideas, new concepts, new ways of
understanding volcanoes. And so – and that’s still going on. So it was a wonderful
natural laboratory, I mean, just spectacular in many ways.
[1:19:43]
Could you give us a sense of the observations that were being made and the
knowledge that came from those?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, without – yeah, I mean, one of the things that we started to see in
the volcano was patterns, you might call them cycles or oscillations, of activity. And
these were sometimes remarkably regular. And we started to see – three sorts of
patterns started to emerge. One was – we put an instrument quite close to the
volcano, which showed that the ground every few hours was going up and down, up
and down. It was breathing. And we could start to link that breathing with the
eruptions. Now when there were explosions the ground would go up for a few hours,
it would explode and the ground would go down. Then we started to see patterns of
activity which were longer, sort of forty or fifty days, so there would be forty or fifty
days where nothing all that much was happening, there was a bit of lava growing but
nothing much happening, and then it quietened down and quietened down. And then
there was a burst, a really serious onset of new activity, and there would be activity
and then it would quieten down for another forty or fifty days and it would start again.
And we started to see this longer pattern of activity. And then over the fifteen years
we saw five episodes of longer periods of quiet, a year or two, followed by longer
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periods of activity of two or three years. So we started to understand – observe these
patterns, we can see that they’re linked to the behaviour of the volcano, and of course
they immediately ask why. I mean, that’s the big question, why are they showing
these patterns. And so then a lot of intellectual research effort goes into finding
mechanisms, physical mechanisms, which explain the patterns. And I’m not sure
we’ve completely explained them but we’ve got a long way. And out of that came
another bit of work with a colleague who I haven’t mentioned before but sort of came
into my existence about – oh, it would have been about 1995, ’96 – ’96 probably. I
got a message from a young Russian mathematician from Moscow State University in
their theoretical mechanics division, saying they were coming in through Bristol, they
were going to go and see Rolls Royce, they were doing something else with Rolls
Royce, and could we come and see them ‘cause they were interested in volcanoes.
And this chap, Oleg Melnik, turned up and Oleg was a sort of mathematician which –
who had – already interested in cyclic behaviour in nature, and we started working
together. We got a Royal Society grant for Oleg to come over and Oleg’s now come
over virtually every year. We’ve got money in grants to support his coming over for a
few weeks. And we started a very strong collaboration together, again sort of maths –
oh, it’s a … yep. So we started collaboration with Oleg and we developed what I
think is a really nice model that – mathematical model of how volcanoes behave,
which explains the patterns we – gives a first order. It’s not – an explanation of some
of these patterns that we’re seeing. And it explains – it’s got explanatory power for a
lot of the things we saw on Montserrat, the measurements we made. And it
essentially turned out that we could explain things by a competition between magma
coming up the volcanic conduit and losing its gas and crystallisation. So as the gas is
lost – in a lot of materials, if you lose gas you can freeze – you don’t have to cool
something, you simply change the phase from a liquid to a solid, so by loss of gas.
And in this – what happens here is that this is accomplished – the solidification occurs
by crystals growing and the rate at which these crystals grow depends – there’s a – it’s
a time dependent thing. So in other words you don’t grow crystals instantaneously,
you have to have some time. So if the lava comes up the tube rather fast and it loses
its gas then these crystals can’t form and therefore it still remains a liquid and it can
erupt – squirt out of the volcano very – relatively easily. If on the other hand it comes
up a bit more slowly, loses the gas and the crystals start to grow, the crystals are
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converting a liquid to a solid so the liquid and crystals become viscous, they get more
difficult to flow out, so it slows down. As it slows down more crystals form. And it’s
a feedback, it’s a positive feedback, so you keep slowing things down and at some
critical value of the speed of the flow, which determines whether it comes out fast or
slow. And because it’s what people call a tipping point, there’s a sort of – this system
flips from one state to another state. It’s a bit like population crashes in biology, the
same – it’s actually almost the same mathematics. And you – and we could then
understand what – we could understand something about where the earthquakes were.
We could understand why we got this flip, you know, we got this sort of cyclic
behaviour.
What does that mean in terms of the predictability of these things?
I think long term, if we sort of understand these better we’ll get – we will improve the
predictability. We’re probably not there yet. We were certainly using the patterns.
You know, even if you didn’t understand the patterns, you sort of saw that the patterns
existed, and therefore we could use the patterns to make – actually manage the crisis.
Yes, you don’t have to know the reasons.
You don’t have to know the reason to recognise that the patterns exist.
[1:27:02]
So we used, for example, these rather shorter patterns – there was one time where the
– Cable and Wireless, the telecommunications, had to – the main junction box for the
telecommunications was in Plymouth, which had been abandoned, the old – that was
now evacuated, and so it was too dangerous. And they were having problems with the
telephone system and the Cable and Wireless technicians had to go – wanted to go
into Plymouth to make these repairs. And we’d seen this – at the time there was this
very marked pattern of swelling, explosions and then a period of several hours when
the ground went down and all was quiet and then it would build up. So clearly what
you had to do was you had to wait until one of these explosions happened and then
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you knew you had several hours where we were pretty confident nothing was going to
happen in the volcano, so the technicians could go in, do the – mend the fuse boxes or
whatever they were doing, and then come out. Similarly we used that pattern when
we as scientists went in the field to fix instruments. We would know there were these
periods when it was very unlikely that the volcano was going to do anything bad so
that was the time – that’s the safe time for people to go in and do things. So – and
then we used the longer pattern to keep – I think that was actually a good thing with
the communication because I remember when I was chief scientist towards the end of
’97 I would – we knew there were these forty or fifty day patterns so nothing very
much is happening at the volcano for three or four weeks and we could go on the
radio and say, well look, the volcano’s pretty quiet at the moment but we’ve had these
cycles, we’ve had these patterns and we’re not going to be surprised if a week or two
from now something happens, you know, there was a significant event. And of
course, because it was in that mode then what we were sort of anticipating did happen
and therefore I think that sort of helped build sort of credibility in the scientists. So
yes, so, as you say, we don’t actually have to understand them necessarily to use them
in a sort of – in a way.
[1:29:33]
Thank you. What did your family feel about you being on Montserrat while this was
going on?
Er, I think they, you know, realised it was an important thing to do. My wife and both
my sons came out at different times. My wife spend some time on Montserrat with
me and we brought both our sons out at different times to – and they – to work on – to
be on the island while I worked. So March/April ’97, they both – they were all out
there with me. So that wasn’t always possible of course, sort of schools and all sorts
of other reasons, so they couldn’t be with me. But I think my wife appreciated how
much, you know, how important the science was to the – doing the science well to –
and the work we were doing was to the local community on Montserrat, that, you
know, I think that she sort of completely understood that. And when my boys came
out they really had a sort of hoot because they were, you know, the older one played
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for them with sort of a team – for the Montserrat team in soccer for a bit and enjoyed
that and they enjoyed the sort of local Caribbean lifestyle and things. So they really –
they enjoyed it.
Yes, how old were they by this time?
They were – it was – yes, there was [counting] … yes, they’d be fifteen and nineteen,
that sort of age. So, you know, sort of teenagers coming into young men. So they
were sort of – being in the Caribbean and liming it up with the locals, you know, as it
were, was good. They really enjoyed that.
[1:31:33]
And over the – having now – I know you’re going to Montserrat tomorrow, for
example, so over quite a long period you’ve been going back to the same island.
Yeah.
To what extent have you developed relationships with particular local people, you
know, particular friendships and particular –
Oh, very much so with local people. I guess I know quite a lot – a few of the
Montserratians and local people. There’s quite a – the person I suppose I have sort of
befriended most is an American guy called David Lea, who’s a local filmmaker and
videographer and we’ve worked quite closely – we’ve made a couple of educational
films about the island. He’s got fantastic footage. And I’ve become pretty close
friends with him. The – I know all the local staff and many of them pretty well. And
there’s, you know, there was a, you know, a chap called Billy Darroux, who I know
well, who was a local policeman and was seconded to the NVO when we were first
there. He was just a constable, a very sensible guy, and now he’s gone back to being
– he’s not the disaster manager of the island, so he’s in charge of disaster mitigation
and prevention. So he’s sort of risen through the police force over the last fifteen
years and now, you know, emerged as this sort of, you know, sort of a leading
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experienced person in the Caribbean for the island. So I’ve known him and lots of
different locals. I mean, as I say, it’s like a village so you sort of get to know lots of
different people. The guy who runs – a chap called Winston Kafu Cabey, who runs
the local radio, he was always interviewing us and I always go round, you know, I
always see him when I’m there. He’s a – so it’s – yeah, I mean, I just know a lot of
people there. And my wife actually – when we were first there, there was a huge
number of people evacuated and she befriended a lady who was evacuated to Hackney
and now lives in Hackney and so she sort of goes down and sees her from time to time
and sort of still keeps in touch. So it’s a very, you know, it’s a bit like talking about
Rhode Island, it’s just a lovely place and lovely community under these sort of
exceptionally traumatic circumstances. So it’s a sort of – it’s a sort of very favourite
place to visit in a way.
To what extent has the experience sort of changed your view of what science is for
and the value of science?
I think it’s changed my – it’s certainly pivotal in my life because having such a – as I
say, being involved so intimately in such a traumatic and dramatic event has certainly,
you know, given me a huge amount of insight into the relationship between science
and policy and decision making and the wider society. So that’s been enormously
valuable for me. And I suppose I … yes, I mean, it’s … I don’t think it’s changed my
view of how science should be done, because what’s so clear, and perhaps, you know,
it’s clear in this interview, is that an awful lot of the science that I did with absolutely
no – no other reason that I was curious about what I saw and was – and, you know,
curiosity driven really, I suppose that’s the usual phrase, that a lot of that science has
turned out to be enormously valuable in a real situation and real context and we can
use that science to the benefit of society. I think it’s also convinced me that, if you
say that you have to do science which is immediately obviously going to benefit
society and you restrict it to that, you’re very likely not to do so much great science. I
mean, I think great science comes from this natural curiosity. It doesn’t come from,
you know, doing things for the benefit of society. I mean, that’s not to say you can’t
do things for the benefit of society which are not great science, I think you can, but
you can’t really have one without the other. So …
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[1:36:46]
Now volcanoes are – they’ve got a kind of popular appeal, and I wondered to what
extent you’ve been asked to contribute to sort of popular science of various kinds,
television programmes, radio programmes.
Yes.
More popular kinds of writing.
Yes. I mean, I’ve done that from time to time when asked. I’ve been involved in, you
know, BBC, Channel 4, National Geographic documentaries on volcanoes from time
to time, including advising on the famous Supervolcano BBC programme that
happened. I’ve done radio interviews and public lectures and occasionally gone into
schools and so forth. So I suppose it’s the sort of general outreach things. Volcanoes
are popular and people like them and so if there are opportunities or people ask me to
do things, I – I’ve never really gone out of my – I wouldn’t say I’ve been particularly
proactive but when I’m asked to do things or people approach me, which they do
quite a lot, I mean, I get lots of – over the years I’ve had lots of telephone calls from
researchers, you know, for some TV company or other that’s – or radio programme
that wants to do a volcano programme and they either ask me for advice or
suggestions or thoughts about the topic, or they’ve invited me to participate in it in
various – so I’ve done a fair amount of that from time to time.
Could you remind us what the BBC Supervolcano programme was?
Yeah, that was the dramatisation of the eruption of – one of the world’s biggest
volcanoes is in Yellowstone National Park and this is a volcano which has had in its
geological past absolutely gigantic eruptions, rather like the ones I was describing
from Argentina. And these are eruptions which are something like a hundred times
bigger than Krakatau in 1883, so these are really gigantic things which would affect a
whole continent. I mean, Yellowstone eruption 6,000 years [600,000 years ago], put
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ash entirely over – the entire North America would have been covered in ash. So
these would have been likely hugely environmentally destructive and these sorts of
eruptions are called – have been nicknamed really, I mean, it’s not a scientific term,
supervolcano, but it sort of gets across the idea. And so the BBC did a dramatisation
of a future eruption of Yellowstone, a two parter, about three or four years ago, and it
got a lot of attention at the time. And they also did a half hour show about the science
behind the programme, which I participated in. So the actual show was a drama doc,
so it didn’t contain any scientists, there were actors and there was a sort of storyline
that was unfolded. But then they had, you know, a half hour show on the science
behind it, which I participated in, and that got a lot of attention at the time. And
people are still, you know, sort of still talking about, you know – it’s still the topic
that you get. In fact I’ve even been asked yesterday by the European Journal, which
is an opinion piece, about – to give a sort of opinion piece about, you know, the
prospects of surviving – civilisation surviving a super eruption. So I’ll probably write
– that’ll be a popular article.
Could you – do you remember anything in particular about the sort of interaction
with BBC researchers and directors and people in that programme? There are – the
reason I’m asking is there are people, historians of science, who are very interested in
the way that scientists interact with TV.
Yes.
So I wondered how it all worked. How does it work? How is your expertise sort of
sucked into the –
Yeah. I mean, that – I think that was a programme that worked reasonably well. I
mean, I think the drama doc was, you know, they have to make it for a mass audience
so there were elements of, you know, of slight sensationalisation, but not much. I
thought they did a really quite good job. The programme itself, the little science
programme which was wrapped around it on BBC2, was I thought pretty well done.
There was a little – I’m not – I’m struggling to remember exactly whether they bought
in the issue that these things are incredibly rare so extremely unlikely to happen in
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anyone’s lifetime. So that’s the – with this particular topic the tendency is for the
media to not emphasise – it sort of rather spoils the party to say that these are so rare
that it’s very, very unlikely anybody’s going to live through one of these. You know,
they’re once every 20,000 years and so they’re so rare that you don’t really – maybe
we don’t really care in a sense. But of course that doesn’t feed into the line that, you
know, these are, you know, this sort of idea of a huge volcanic eruption destroying
civilisation is a, you know, it’s a sort of apocalyptic, you know, sort of mythological
element to it that people like and so the companies know that, the media know that,
and so they don’t want to really say this is not very likely at all [laughs].
[1:42:44]
So I think that – so I think that particular programme – I’ve had much less – I did a
Horizon – I was a big part in a Horizon programme on volcanoes about seven or eight
years ago and they filmed in our lab. And on the whole it was a good programme, I
thought, but I very much at that time, and I still think, that Horizon misrepresents –
very commonly misrepresents how science is done.
Why do you say that?
Well, they like – a lot of their programmes, if you watch them, have two sort of ideas
behind the way the programmes are structured. Firstly they love the eureka moment.
They like the idea that science is a series of brilliant breakthroughs where the genius
sort of is sitting there and, you know, the, you know, Archimedes, you know, sort of
sitting in your bathroom or looking at the volcano and you come up with this sort of
fantastic insight. You know, Newton beneath the tree, this idea of the eureka moment
in science is very – to me very overt in the way Horizon presents its programmes.
Now I’m sure there are eureka moments but the vast bulk of science simply doesn’t
work that way, I don’t think. I think if you ask most practicing scientists they don’t
think it works that way either. I mean, it’s a sort of collective activity and people do
make – individuals do make surges forward but often it’s a sort of iterative interactive
thing and the progress is sort of slow and steady. It may build up to some tipping
point where there is a significant surge but on the whole it does not consist of sort of
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huge eureka moments, and I think they promote that idea too much in Horizon. They
also like the idea again of the – of small numbers of individuals. They’ll always focus
on a small number of individuals, again rather than viewing science as a sort of – a
collective activity of a very large number of people who work together in a way,
albeit competitively. And so I think they – and I can understand why they do that
because it’s a nice, you know, you can see it’s a – it often makes the story – it sort of
highlights the story, doesn’t it? But I just think they tend to distort things sometimes.
How was that played out in the case of the film that you were in in terms of the –
Yeah. I think they – the other thing that I – of course is a big problem, I think, for
scientists working with the media, and even a really good programme like Horizon – I
mean, I’ve got a lot of time – it’s one of the best science programmes there is but, as I
say, that’s – this eureka idea I think is one of their sort of shortcomings. And I don’t
think if you looked at the early Horizon programmes you’d see so much of that, some
of the, you know, my recollection of them. I mean, it’d be interesting to look at them
and see. But the other thing of course is they interview you for an enormous amount
of time, so you’ll spend, you know, maybe two or three hours being interviewed, sort
of lots of questions, and then out of every ninety minutes they’ve filmed and things
you’ve said, they’ll select two minutes to put into the programme and they’ll fit it in
with other experts who say other things which link up or tell the story. And so the
story is always in the hands of the programme editor. Maybe that’s right, but it means
that as a scientist you sort of feel you’ve – you’re – in a way you’re being sort of
manipulated, aren’t you, because you may have some view about what the story you
want to tell is about the science and if they’ve chosen something which – that, you
know, is either out of context or it doesn’t make an important point that you’ve made
somewhere else in the interview, then, you know, your – the science is being
presented in a way that you feel uncomfortable with, or that you could feel
uncomfortable with. And I know – I mean, I know – maybe there’s no other way.
You know, the programme maker’s got to make an attractive TV programme and –
but you – it always give you a sense of being a bit uncomfortable about that sort of
relationship. You’ve got no real influence about what they’re going to – what story
they’re going to decide. And I had a very bad experience on Montserrat because we
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were doing work with Discovery programme and all those programmes are produced
by – tend to be produced by programme, you know, they’re not – there’s a Discovery
programme but it’s not made by Discovery, it’s made by some TV company that’s
been subcontracted to do it, a sort of production team. And we did one at a quite
sensitive time in the eruption of Montserrat, where I – and they were a very nice
group of people. I mean, and they went round Montserrat. They interviewed me.
They interviewed lots of other people. They interviewed locals. They were talking
about the situation on Montserrat. And we kept – I mean, sort of – because we’d had
previously bad experience, we kept saying to them, okay, Discovery, that’s, you
know, you’ve got a good reputation and we don’t want this sort of sensationalised.
We don’t want this – sort of Montserrat sort of depicted as an apocalyptic desert, you
know, where everybody’s about to die, sort of thing. And we said, you know, you can
see people are getting on with their lives, we’re watching the volcano, it’s still pretty
active but we’ve, you know, we think we know roughly what’s going on and where to
keep people. It’s getting back – this was at a time when the island was getting back to
sort of – some sort of sense of normality. And they said, oh yes, yes, you know, we
won’t – this. And then, you know, sort of as soon as the programme started,
‘Montserrat, the ticking time bomb in the Caribbean,’ [laughs], ‘when is it going to
blow,’ sort of. And then the whole programme was around this sort of storyline of,
you know, that this was a sort of really dangerous place. And of course it upset
relatives of people who were living on Montserrat. And of course you’re then
associated with it, because I was appearing on it and giving little, you know, they got
little clips of interviews with me and other people from the observatory, so you’re
then associated with it and then the local people get annoyed because nobody wants to
invest in the economy, the relatives in London or Atlanta see this programme and then
they’re ringing up, my god, why don’t you – this sounds terrible, why don’t you
leave, and things like that. So it’s very malign I think to the local community and I
found that very – those sorts of – that way of sort of manipulation, if you like, is a,
you know, a bad aspect to the media.
[1:50:45]
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In the Horizon programme, in terms of the filming in the laboratory, what did they
want to film and what ended up being shown?
I think they filmed some of our experiments about collapsing columns and things like
that, when we put dense fountains into a tank and they collapsed like a pyroclastic
flow or went upwards. I think they did some film of that. I think they did one of –
they might have done some of my colleague’s work on shock tubes. I think they did
that. They did a series – they showed, you know, some of the experiments and how it
linked. I mean, it was a pretty – I think it was a pretty good programme actually. I
mean, my recollection of it. As I say, it’s this – they did present it as this sort of
eureka – this eureka idea was definitely very prominent.
In this case what was the eureka idea?
I suppose it was this idea of collapsing columns and things going up and so forth.
But, you know, it was – in several places they would do, you know, depict something
which is actually a collective enterprise of the science community, where several
different scientists at different institutions round the world have actually contributed
to this particular idea, but it’s sort of, you know, I just feel that it was the tendency to
make it always just this single person who’d done it all. And, as I say, I don’t find
that – I think it’s a bit of a distortion of the science method – of the way science
works.
And what do you get in terms of direction – in the case of this Horizon film, what did
you get in terms of direction about how they wanted you to present – how they wanted
you to talk to, you know, or act.
Well, I think they – they spend a lot of time filming. Sometimes you’re commenting
on the experiment. I remember – again, you spend an awful lot of time being
interviewed and lots and lots of different questions about things. An awful lot of that
is not used at all. So again it’s the sort of two minutes out of ninety minutes sort of
scenario. So you don’t really quite know what – I guess you’re sometimes not always
clear what the programme producer and director are really quite – what they’re trying
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to – you don’t quite know what story they’re trying to tell. And they may – it’s quite
possible they don’t know themselves until they’ve done all the interviews and they
start looking at the stuff and they see how, you know, a storyline that makes good TV
emerges out of all the interviews they’ve done. I’m sure that may be one of the things
that happens. And then they’ve got, you know, the film on the production table of
clips and they’re sort of splicing them together and sort of seeing how they’re
organised and how the interviews fit in with the visuals and things like that. So I
suspect the storyline sort of emerges sometimes as they’re going along, although
maybe they also have a broad plan when they begin.
[1:53:55]
Could you tell me the story about your involvement in the recent Icelandic volcano,
which affected aeroplanes and so on?
Yes. I – when the Iceland ash stopped all the aircraft in April 2010, I was actually in
Paris at the time at a disaster risk reduction international meeting, where sort of – all
the disaster people were stuck in Paris [laughs]. So I had to make my way back to the
UK. I got an email from John Bebington’s office inviting me to join the scientific
advisory group that was considering the crisis. So it took me about thirty hours to get
home and then I, early that week, went down to the sort of first committee meeting of
the group that was considering – advising the government on the ash. And then I sat
in on that with my colleague, Willy Aspinall, and another colleague at Bristol and
people from the BTS and the Met Office and Civil Aviation Authority, a wide variety
of people around the table. And John Bebington was sort of asking for sort of, you
know, advice on the situation and how they responded.
What do you remember about what he – the sort of members of the panel contributed
to the –
Well, it was – obviously the Met Office do the forecasting of the ash using their
weather forecasting models. We as volcanologists provide the information on what
the volcano is doing and how much ash it’s putting into the atmosphere. And so we –
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we were I suppose trying to – to some extent one of the major outcomes was the view
that the volcanologists and the atmospheric scientists at the Met Office needed to
work together much more closely so that the – the assumptions that the Met Office
were making in developing their models were the correct assumptions about how the
volcano was behaving. And so there was quite a lot of discussion around that issue.
And we had some concerns that the right numbers were being put in and we wanted to
sort of make sure they – our Met Office colleagues understood what was happening at
the volcano and how they should – what’s called the source step [term], in other
words that’s really it, how much ash is being put into the atmosphere and what
happens close to the volcano. And so we were sort of discussing that issue quite a lot.
Of course that was quite critical because that was – what you assume goes in from the
volcano determines what you – what happens – where you can fly and where you
can’t fly. And that became a very acute issue very quickly because the engine
manufacturers at the time – the airlines put a lot of pressure on the government and
the engine manufacturers as well to say what – how much ash could you fly through
safely. And so they came up with a figure, an amount of ash, and when there was so
little ash in the air that you could fly the aircraft through it. And before that anywhere
you had any ash whatsoever you couldn’t fly. And that’s why the, you know, the
whole of Europe stopped for six days. When they changed it to being some threshold,
in other words there was a definite value of the concentration of ash in the atmosphere
that you could fly, then it really changed things very fundamentally from a science
point of view. Because all the Met Office had been asked to do was to say where the
ash was, they didn’t have to say how much ash there was. As soon as that decision
that you could fly came around then the request from the – for the Met Office and the
modellers was to say where it was dilute and where it wasn’t, and that’s scientifically
much, much more challenging and much more difficult to do. And so there was a lot
of discussion around that issue as well and some of those issues are not yet resolved.
I’m going to the next meeting of John Bebington’s on 2 November in London to talk
more about some of the issues that have arisen. So it’s still an ongoing issue of how
to do that.
[1:59:00]
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At the time during the six days was it necessary to make new measurements or to look
at the volcano?
Well, it was of course. The Icelanders were making a lot of the critical
measurements. They were using radar to measure the activity of the volcano, for
example. So the information from the Met Office – sorry, the Iceland Met Office,
who was very critical to – and of course, because it was a very rapidly evolving
situation, new information was coming in all the time. So it was a bit like the
Montserrat thing, it’s when the volcano’s very active, everybody’s extremely busy
and new information’s coming in and that new information has to be digested quickly
and assessed. And that was definitely happening. And then you’ve got – in the case
of the ash, you’ve got lots of different actors. You’ve got the Civil Aviation
Authority. You’ve got the government, the cabinet office. You’ve got the – you’ve
got the air traffic control people, you’ve got the airlines, you’ve got the engine
manufacturers, all these – you’ve got the media, you’ve got CEOs of big airlines,
Willie Walsh and Michael O’Leary sounding off in the media. So there’s all these
things happening simultaneously and so it’s a very sort of frenetic environment, which
is sort of constantly changing when you’ve got an emergency like that.
And what were you – do you remember what you were able to sort of advise in detail
based on what data you could receive from –
Yes. What I think – the main tangible outcome from my point of view is that we were
asked to get together with the Met Office, specifically between the volcanologists and
the Met Office, and to sort out how we interfaced our understanding of what was
going on in the volcano and what was under their weather forecasting model. And so
we had some very productive meetings with the Met Office out away from the main
committee, where we just got Met Office scientists and volcanologists working
together and we started to develop – at the time I think there was a lot of
misunderstanding about volcanoes by the Met Office and probably misunderstanding
by us, the volcanologists, about the nature of the models they were running. And so
those meetings were very good because they really established this sort of cross
disciplinary communication between atmospheric meteorologists and volcanologists.
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And we, you know, we made some really good progress. We’re still working with the
Met Office and I think that’s a very good outcome because, I mean, I think it has
eventually meant that the forecasting models are on a much more robust sound
scientific basis than they were.
Who did you work with at the – were you one of the volcanologists who was –
I was working with one of the volcanologists, yeah.
Who at the Met Office were you working with?
It was – we were working with quite a few different people. In fact one of the
problems we had is that the Met Office is an enormous organisation and it was
actually very confusing for us to understand actually who did what. So we met
different Met Office people in different meetings and they would never – sometimes
not be the same person. And we interacted with people in the Met Office and it
wasn’t always the same people. And we really found it pretty confusing, I think, the
geologists/volcanologists, about who did what, who was responsible for what, you
know, whether we – if we talked to x, would they be telling y. And it was very – it
was a confusing – there was a sort of – I remember really quite a lot of confusion in
understanding how the Met Office worked and what its hierarchies were and who was
responsible for what. I’m not sure I still even do now [laughs]. So I think that was a
little bit of a difficulty because we’d sometimes talk to one group or one person and
think they’d understood what we were saying and then the next time we talked to
somebody else from the Met Office it was clear that they didn’t understand what we’d
just told this other person. So there was – or discussed with this other person. So it
could be quite confusing.
Did you have any links with Julia Slingo, I think who was director of –
Oh Julia, yes, only on a sort of very high level. She was on – Julia was on the
committee. She was very supportive of the volcanologists and the Met Office people
getting together so she sort of facilitated that. And I think she was, you know, she
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was – she was, you know, sort of instrumental in making it a much better working –
improving the working relationships between the two groups.
[2:04:12]
What was the sort of key misunderstandings of volcanoes that the meteorologists were
working with initially?
Well, that gets a bit technical in a way but I’ll try and explain it as best I can. If you
have a – if you want to predict where the ash is and you want to predict how much ash
is in the atmosphere over Britain, which is a long way from – 800 kilometres from
Iceland, you firstly have to know how much ash is put into the atmosphere by the
volcano at the time, so a flux of ash. Then you have to know how much of that ash
actually falls out quite close to the volcano. Now to simplify this a little bit, the Met
Office did not really understand that most of it fell out near the volcano. So if you
assume that most of it that came out of the volcano gets to Britain then you’re going
to get a lot more ash than if a lot of it falls out near the volcano. And they hadn’t –
initially they hadn’t really appreciated that. Now the volcanologists knew. I mean,
we’d known that for twenty, thirty years, so it wasn’t new science to us, but then
we’re in a completely different field and we don’t interact with the meteorologists
much and they hadn’t sort of appreciated that point. And that was one of the sort of
early things that we discussed with them and they sort of realised what, you know,
realised this point and they sort of made the adjustments to the models to take that
account.
Does that mean then early on in this sort of crisis their predictions about the amount
of dust in the atmosphere were exaggerated?
Well, you see, the point actually was they didn’t have to do that. They didn’t have to
tell you how much ash there was. That wasn’t the rules. It was zero tolerance. So all
they had to say was where the ash was, okay [laughs]. That’s all they had to do and
they could do that quite well with their models, I think, reasonably well. And then
you just don’t fly where the ash – there’s any ash at all, so in a way that wouldn’t
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have mattered very much early on. But as soon as the rules were changed so that you
actually had to say whether there was enough ash to cause a problem to a flight or not,
then the rules have changed and you have to actually say how much ash is and then
this does matter and it matters in a very big way. And so that very early dialogue
happened right at this point where the Met Office were being sort of asked to do
something they hadn’t been asked to do before, which was predict how much ash was
in the air. And that – I think the sort of dialogue they had with us made them
appreciate that if they were going to do that they needed to understand this point that
most of the ash falls out near the volcano. And then of course, if it mostly falls out
near the volcano, how do you actually find out how much there is. And you then
come into using satellite technology to look at the cloud and try and estimate from the
cloud how much ash is in the atmosphere. And that’s where one of my colleagues,
Matt Watson, comes in. He’s an expert in that. He was involved in these discussions.
What is the sort of protocol – when you’re contacted by – was John Bebington then
the chief scientific advisor?
He was, yes.
When you’re contacted by a chief scientific advisor asking you for help, is it optional,
I suppose is the question I’ve got? I mean –
Well, I don’t know whether it’s optional or not. I suppose it is optional, the
volunteering. You don’t get paid any fees or anything, you just get travel expenses
for doing the stuff and you have to – and it is quite demanding because they’re going
to be asking you to not just come to a meeting but to do some things like go and meet
the Met Office, go and do some – maybe do some calculations or do some stuff which
helps inform the process. So that’s then disrupting people from the things that they
would normally be doing. So – but I think the vast bulk of scientists would of course
want to help and that’s what usually happens. I’m not aware of many people who’ve
said, no, I’m not going to get involved when they’re asked.
[End of Track 6]
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Track 7
Could you tell me about your involvement with the sort of inside of the Royal Society
since becoming a fellow of it?
Yes. I mean, I’ve been involved in a number of ways, probably less so in the last
several years with one exception. I’ve been on their – the selection committee for
new fellows a couple of times. I’ve been on the council once. I’ve chaired something
called the Hooke Committee, which organises the discussion meetings of the Royal
Society, organised a couple of those myself as well. And I’ve been on various – a
couple of taskforces or, you know, reports that have been done by the Royal Society
over the years. So I’ve been sort of in and out of sort of committee work, you know,
actually ever since being a fellow, so I’ve always had some involvement or, you
know, selection for university research fellows for the Royal Society or overseas
grants, so I’ve been on a number of the committees over the years. So I’ve – so I
guess I’ve done my sort of share. I haven’t really done very much the last few years
at the RS except now I’m just recently – back in February I was appointed as chair of
the advisory committee on maths education, called ACME, which is largely funded by
the Royal Society, or not – it’s funded jointly by the Royal Society and the
Department of Education and the Gatsby Foundation and Wellcome put money in.
And I’ve – but it’s run out of the Royal Society, so I work with people in the Royal
Society too on that particular topic.
Could you describe what you do for that committee, I mean, precisely what you do?
Yes. Well, I chair a committee of experts in mathematics education and this
committee both responds to requests from government for information on policy or
topics but also is proactive. The committee can take a topic like A levels or primary
school mathematics or whatever the topic is and they can – it can produce its own
report and their own study. And so the committee I run – I don’t run actually, I chair,
which is a different thing from running, is organised through the Royal Society, so
there’s sort of three secretariat – on the secretariat, who do a lot of the real work. And
then the committee members are paid for their time, so they’re sort of – it’s a sort of
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professional arrangement, so these are professional educational experts who then
provide the evidence and the analysis which informs the sort of public debate on
maths education and informs the Department of Education about, you know,
particular issues. And they always have had – the committee’s been existing for ten
years. They’ve always had a non mathematician as the chair, who’s also a fellow of
the Royal Society, and they usually look for somebody who has used maths a lot but
isn’t a mathematician. And so I sort of fitted in there and then my predecessor Julie
Higgins is the same – who’s a material scientist, was the same sort of – that was the
same rationale for her to be the chair. So I’ve done it for about eight months. It’s
very interesting work. It’s another dimension of the interface between policy and
evidence, which is – so there is some, if you like, synergy with some of the things I’ve
done before in the context of volcanoes and radioactive waste. You know, the same
sort of political issues, generic political issues, emerge. So it’s very interesting.
Obviously you actually do have sort of direct contact with ministers or their civil
servants or their special advisors. The ACME is actually funded by the – partly
funded by the Department of Education, so they can sort of call on ACME to provide
information like – they’ve asked ACME to – one of our big projects is to coordinate
the maths community’s views on post sixteen education in maths, where the UK is
completely out of kilter with any other country.
Is it?
Yep.
In what way is it?
Well, almost – only a minority of our children go to post sixteen education and do any
maths at all, so they stop at GCSE and that’s it, unless they get an A and go on and do
an AS level or an A level. That’s about fifteen percent of children, you know, in post
sixteen will be doing A level maths or further maths or AS level, but the eighty-five
percent don’t do any at all. So in almost every country we’re competing with, the vast
bulk of kids post sixteen do continue to do some maths and that’s I think rightly seen
as a really serious problem. And the – Michael Gove, the current secretary of state,
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wants to see at least eighty percent of kids do maths post sixteen and I think most
people are very supportive of that idea. How you get there is the problem. It’s a huge
challenge and our committee are working on producing a report for the DFE, which
informs their thinking about how they do this.
What are you gathering for that report? Who are you speaking to and – in other
words, you talked about the relationship between evidence and policy. Well, what is
the nature of the evidence that you’re –
Well, the evidence is the – things like the Nuffield Foundation, which does a lot of
educational research, individual educational researchers in universities, mathematics
associations and mathematical societies, Association of Mathematics. There’s a wide
range of bodies, organisations and individuals who have various sorts of evidence. By
far the most compelling is the simple table that says the proportion of kids post
sixteen who do maths in different countries. And if you take all the OECD developed
countries you will find that we’re a complete outlier in terms of mathematics
education post sixteen. You then couple that with the observation that almost all
universities now have very substantial remedial mathematics facilities in terms of
teams and education within them because they have to make up for the deficiencies of
this school education. And that’s – and you then look at the sort of recent survey that
half the population are not even up to the required standard for an eleven year old,
that’s nationally, you can see that there’s a major problem for a country which is
trying to make its way by being clever and in a world where jobs are going to be –
increasingly require numeracy. So I think everyone’s seen that as a big problem and
so the question is how do you – what do you do about it. That’s the – and so that’s
what our committee is thinking about.
[8:26]
So we are thinking more about what, you know, what are the options, how do we do
this.
Have you come to any conclusions about why we’re in the position of being –
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Well, I have a personal view but it’s a purely personal view.
Okay, what is that?
I think it’s because – the history of education in Britain goes back to really deep
historical roots and it’s made – and it’s rooted in an elitist system for education, which
led to A levels being created in 1951 for university educat’ - entrants when only three
or four percent of children went to university, perhaps even less than that in 1951.
And we have an educational system which specialises very early, much earlier than
any other education system, and I would say that, if you look back at the history of
education, you can pinpoint that that was a consequence of a view of education which
was developed in the 1930s and ‘40s and led to the 1944 Education Act. And some of
that – those views are now known to be flawed, seriously flawed, and – but it led to
secondary moderns and grammar schools. It led to A levels as a sort of elite exam
and specialism. And we’re sort of saddled with a historical legacy and no single
government since then has really – although there’ve been – successive governments
have had ambitions to reform education fundamentally, they’ve either never had the –
if you like, the commitment to really changing things fundamentally, or if they’ve
tried they’ve never been in government long enough to do it completely or
thoroughly. So we’ve sort of got a mishmash of secondary education in Britain.
We’ve got places that do the eleven plus and places that don’t, places that have
secondary moderns and grammar schools, places that don’t, comprehensives. We’ve
got city academics that Labour introduced. We’ve got free schools now that Michael
Gove wants to bring in. We’ve got academies. We’ve got a complete mishmash of
different educational concepts for secondary education, which are – which is – we’ve
acquired historically and nobody quite knows how to unravel it all. I mean, that
would be my view. And you can, you know, I was going to be sort of slightly
provocative. I know people who think this is correct but this is just my opinion. I
think if you went back to the 1930s and you looked at the psychologists of the time
who developed behavioural psychology and invented the IQ test, you’d come up with
a lot of the explanations of where we are. You would come up with people who
thought that – and thought their evidence at the time was pointing to a very strong
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genetic control on people’s abilities and that therefore you could take an exam at
Eleven Plus and that would tell you whether you went to a secondary modern and you
became a road sweeper or you went to a grammar school and became a lawyer. And
that was rooted in that very early work, which we now know, some of it is
scientifically flawed. But that was the science of the time which informed an
educational system which we still have strong resonance with or remnants of. So
we’ve ended up – and it’s a very roundabout way, but we’ve ended up with a situation
where people are asked to specialise too early, I think, a lot of it, and that’s why, you
know, you go to a – you’ve done ten or eleven GCSEs, or formerly O levels, and so
you had a relatively broad up to sixteen, and then suddenly you’re in the sixth form
and you’ve just got to choose three subjects. And politicians down the ages have been
very reluctant to challenge A levels because they – it’s a sort of thing that everybody
in Britain understands, maybe not the rest of the world but Britain understands, and so
changing it is a really difficult thing to do. But it narrows people down and it means
if you’re going to do three A levels, how do you do some maths as well or some
literacy, for example. So I think that’s where we’ve ended up. We’ve had an
educational system which has evolved with time in a way which hasn’t been – isn’t
entirely strategic and therefore we’ve ended up with this sort of specialism. And how
we get out of that, I mean, it’s – I think – my personal view is that the idea that Gove
has got about EBacc for – instead of GCSEs for maths, English and – is it maths,
English and science? That seems to have some merit. It’s sort of the baccalaureate
idea is starting. And I think even – I’ve heard that there may even be some thinking
in the Department of Education about producing a sort of A level ABacc, which
would be a move into a, you know, sort of broader education structure where it would
be much easier to have people do a bit of maths after sixteen. So that would be my
sort of potted [laughs] and very personal view of, you know, what happened. Of
course you can relate it to a sort of personal issue, that I failed the eleven plus so
maybe I’ve got a sort of bias [laughs] that that wasn’t a very good exam.
[15:06]
And how does the committee, you know, how precisely does the committee
communicate with government?
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How does it communicate?
Yeah. By talking, you know, when and how.
Yes, it’s a variety of ways. The Royal Society has a wonderful secretariat who do a
lot of the work behind the scenes, three people, who worked produce the ACME
reports. They keep an – they do a tremendous amount of work going to various
meetings and conferences and things to do with maths education so that they network
and have, you know, their finger on the pulse of what’s happening in maths education.
They talk to people. Then at the other end they have – they develop relationships with
the special advisors to ministers, the civil servants in the DFE and develop personal
relationships with them so that those civil servants can call up and ask questions and
interact. They sometimes come to our – are invited to our meetings so we can have a
discussion with them or – like we had the chair of Ofqual come to one of our
meetings, so people, you know, so people in the maths education – people who are in
– chief executives of exam boards who are going to control the, you know, influence
the assessment process. So – and then meetings occasionally with ministers. There’s
a sort of – about every three months there’s a meeting between Department of
Education ministers and representatives of the science and maths community to talk
about STEM, and I get invited to that. So there’s a whole range of communication
mechanisms that have been developed in order to sort of get this sort of
communication and exchange going.
[17:06]
Thank you. And could you tell me now about more recent work with the mining
industry? More recently meaning since you’ve come to Bristol.
Yeah. I guess – I’ve had two sort of interactions, one which is ongoing and one which
started about 2003. And it was sort of serendipity actually again, completely a matter
of luck. About 2003 De Beers, the diamond mining company in Southern Africa,
decided that they would put a team of – a sort of think tank team for science and
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technology in Wells in Somerset, which is sort of fifteen miles from Bristol. And
why they chose Wells I don’t really know but they did. And they certainly chose
Britain because their main interests are in Southern Africa, Canada and Russia, there
are no diamond mines in Britain, and sort of – Britain’s a sort of hub and, you know,
you can get to Russia or Canada or Southern Africa easier than if you were in, you
know, South Africa. So they chose Britain as the place and they chose Wells, which
is quite close to Bristol University. And I got rung up by a very enthusiastic guy
called Matthew Field, who worked in this think tank, he was their sort of senior
geologist, and he said, you know, ‘We know you do volcanology and volcanic rocks
at Bristol. Would you be interested in looking at some of our mines?’ The diamonds
are in little – in rocks called kimberlites, which are little – essentially little volcanoes.
And I said, ‘Yeah, come and talk.’ And we started talking. We had a visit to
Southern Africa to look at some mines and it was pretty clear that this was an
absolutely great example of the opportunity for real synergy between industry and
academia because they wanted to – they were finding it more difficult to find
diamonds. Their mining strategy depends on their understanding of the geology of
the mines, you know, bits where there’s a lot of diamonds, bits where there aren’t.
They wanted to be able to predict that. So from their point of view, they wanted to
get cleverer at finding diamonds and mining them out. And so they thought, I think
rightly, that academia could help there by looking at the sort of fundamentals. We
found it of huge interest because in an active volcano you can’t go down and look at
what’s inside the vent. If it’s erupting it’s not going to be a good idea and even when
it’s not erupting it’s virtually impossible to go, you know, a kilometre down
underground and see what’s there. So we had very little direct observations of
volcanic vents. In these kimberlites, which are volcanic vents, they’re mining out
volcanic vents and so there’s a fantastic opportunity to actually see, in enormous
detail that mining allows, the sort of insides of a volcanic event and find out what’s
going on – and make some inferences about what’s going on. So there was a real
synergy and we – after some discussions they gave us really quite a lot of money to
have a significant research programme on these rocks and on their mines and they
funded some young researchers and some PhD students. And we had, for about five
or six years until the diamond market crashed, you know, just in 2008, ’09, the thing
fell, you know, luxury goods just fell through the floor, but over about a five year
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period we had a very productive and interesting relationship with them and did some
really very interesting research.
What did involve in detail, the research? How do you – how as a geologist do you
study a diamond mind?
Well, you – it’s absolutely the traditional geological tools. You go down in the mines
and you map the different rock types. You use drill cores to say where the different
rock types are and you look at what sorts of rocks are down these old volcanic vents.
And then you make inferences from the observations the grain size, the thickness of
the units, the size of the units, what they’re made of, all these sort of basic geological
observations. You compile them all, you take samples back to the laboratory and you
look at the minerals and they tell you other things about the origin of the rocks and
what was going on. And then you use that like a jigsaw puzzle, like any bit of
geology, you try and put all these bits of evidence together and you try and synthesise
it into a sort of, you know, it’s inductive science, you’re trying to – you construct
what, you know, what sort of model or what processes fit best with the observations
you can see. So it’s a very similar style to all the other research that I’ve done. We
got students doing little experiments in the laboratory and that worked well and
worked with some mechanical engineers on flow through beds. You probably
remember that I talked about much earlier, even in my PhD, I got interested in
fluidisation of sand by passing gas through sand, and then when I was at CALTECH
we did experiments on gases – sand at high pressure exploding. And then of course
when you get in a volcanic vent that’s exactly the situation. You’ve got a volcano
erupting huge amounts of gas through a hole in the ground with lots of fragments in it
and so you expect some of the same processes to go on. And so you can start thinking
about the geology in terms of these sort of physical concepts and start to build up a
picture of what went on.
And was it a – did it lead to the companies being able to determine where diamonds
were more likely and less likely?
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Yes, I think they – it advanced the field significantly. The work we did has had really
quite a big influence. We had lots of fights with some of the older kimberlite
geologists and still do. And it’s a rather strange world because the diamond business
and the geologist who’ve been working in the diamond industries have been sort of
working in a – in a sort of – to some extent in a vacuum, or at least it’s a very inward
looking – it’s traditionally been very inward looking, the sort of consultants and the
mining company geologists and the odd academic. But they’ve been sort of talking to
each other and they’d never really looked at these rocks, I don’t think, in any serious
way as little volcanoes and then taken the understanding of people like myself and
other colleagues round the world could bring to – who knew about volcanoes could
bring to the understanding. And so they came up with some – there’s some very good
work but there’s also some sort of slightly quixotic and to some extent bizarre ideas
that emerged. And of course we were – had to come to the conclusion that some of
these really weren’t – really weren’t sustainable as ideas and so that was a bit
challenging to this community. And so we probably had more fights than sort of – on
the research in that project than I’ve had before, but in a way it was quite entertaining
and fun in a way to, you know, sort of really try and persuade this community that
there were some other alternative ways of looking at these rocks. And we found, you
know, a really simple result, which is that these kimberlites, little volcanoes, they
occur in clusters and if you drill into the top of one and you find that there’s certain
sizes and quality of diamonds, if you think all the material from that pipe or that little
volcano comes from the same volcano and filled up the hole, then you might expect
the diamonds near the surface to be the same as the diamonds at depth, or have some
similarities. We were able to show that sometimes these little volcanoes erupted and
they’re only half full and then a neighbouring volcano with completely different
diamonds erupted and it put its diamonds into the old hole. So that meant the
diamonds in the shallow part of the hole are completely different, or could be
completely different, from the ones at depth. So that sort of conceptual understanding
– that’s an example, they’re – the conceptual understanding is changed so that, you
know, you start to look at the geology and interpret it and the way you’re going to
mine it out in really very different ways. And we found out a lot of things about the
geology of that sort, which I think have been very helpful for them to understand the
geology of these volcanoes.
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[27:12]
And you said there was more recent work that was ongoing.
Yeah, we’ve – we’re just starting a project, which is – we went – we’ve been having
conversations for a couple of years with BHP Billiton, a huge mining company based
in Australia but multinational. It’s the world’s biggest mining company. And we’ve
sort of persuaded them that we should do something similar to the kimberlite project
for copper. You know, the world’s struggling to get enough copper to keep going,
copper price goes up, they need new mines, need new places to get copper. And
copper ore deposits are very largely, not entirely, but many of the big ones are old
volcanoes. So we’ve put to them the same simple argument, that if you bring in a
group of guys who know about how volcanoes work, modern volcanoes, and we start
looking at these old ones then maybe we’ll start seeing things which help you find
them and help you understand them so that you can develop the mines in a more
efficient way. So it’s a similar sort of argument. And we’re just starting that project,
which will be largely in Chile.
And that’s a – and so the fieldwork is going to start …
The fieldwork will start this coming year, yeah.
I see.
I mean, given the stage I am in my career, I’m not planning to spend a huge amount of
time out there, so we’ve got – we managed to persuade them to get a lectureship in the
department, which we’ve just hired, and that lecturer is a – so I guess it’s going to be
sort of the new generation of geologists who do a lot more of the fieldwork that I do.
As I say, I’m not planning to spend huge amounts of time out there.
[29:16]
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And could you talk about current work on the global volcano –
Model, yes, that’s right, yeah. That’s an idea that myself and a colleague in the
British Geological Survey had, which is to try and develop an international network of
– within volcanology, which collates, compiles and analyses data on a global basis
and also analyses – uses that information to assess hazard and risk round the world on
a sort of global basis. And it’s partly coordination but it’s also trying to get the whole
world’s community of volcanologists to work better together so we produce more
standardisation in the way we analyse data, the way we assess hazards, so that we
don’t do something completely different in Indonesia which can’t be compared with
Chile, which is unfortunately the case. That we have models where there are
protocols which mean that there are more standards so that we up the game in terms
of having global databases and global analysis of risk and hazard which allow us to be
much more robust and systematic about the way we map hazard and risk. That’s the
concept. So we’ve got some money from NERC and we’ve managed to get about
fifteen global – round the world, about fifteen institutions involved in this project.
And it’s early days but the vision is that this will become a sort of sustainable activity,
which will eventually evolve into a sort of more harmonised way of presenting the
science and evidence and information in volcanology. That’s the sort of idea. We are
doing – we’ve already done some – quite a lot of work for the World Bank,
developing – some of the early work on this for the World Bank on certain developing
countries where we’ve systematically assessed the hazard, the vulnerability – really
actually the exposure of populations, the exposure of infrastructure, and converted
that into risk indexes. And then we’ve looked at the capacity of different countries to
monitor the volcanoes and address their hazards, you know, if you like, go into
disaster risk reduction. And we’ve done a study, which we presented to the World
Bank about a year ago. We’re now being commissioned by the UN ISDR to make the
first global assessment of hazard and risk from volcanism for the UN, for their 2015
report. So we’ve got about – so the global volcano model will work – when I say –
what global volcano model really means is these sort of fifteen institutions will work
together to create a systematic assessment of volcanic risk round the world. And
that’s never been done before so that’s the sort of – that’s the idea and we’ll present
that in the UN document.
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I think it might surprise people that there isn’t already a kind of global identification
of volcanoes with an attached risk for each one.
Yes, there’s a global – the Smithsonian do a wonderful job of documenting volcanism
round the world. They know – they’ve got a website where you can find every
volcano in the world and you can find some basic information on it. But that’s not a
risk analysis, that’s just saying there’s a volcano here, it’s got this history, it does this
or that. That information and ancillary information hasn’t been converted into a
proper thorough risk assessment.
For an individual volcano, how do you calculate its risk?
Er, we … we calculate its risk by firstly saying that you have to define what you mean
by risk, what’s at risk. It’s a loss business. So we at the moment only define risk in
terms of loss of life, potential loss of life. So the simplest thing you can possibly do is
you can look at volcanoes around the world. You look at how far the volcano can
reach and where people have been killed historically and you can say, well, it’s – on
the whole it’s pretty dangerous thirty kilometres from most volcanoes. At a hundred
kilometres you’re probably pretty well safe. Between 130 [130 30 and 100
kilometres], well, you know, there might be something but you’re probably okay.
This is a very crude thing. Then you simply count up the number of people within
thirty kilometres of the volcano and that’s the exposed population. And you could
only go from – you then take the hazard of the volcano, which you can measure from
its history, and you multiply its hazard index by its exposure and that comes up with a
sort of risk number. It’s not truly risk in the sense that by measuring populations
we’re measuring exposure, we’re not measuring vulnerability. So there might be
100,000 people living round a volcano in a developed country where there’s really
good early warning systems and evacuation plans and so forth, and when the volcano
erupts they’re all safely evacuated and they’re – the exposure’s the same but the
vulnerability is different. On the other hand you might have another volcano, perhaps
in a less developed country or with less infrastructure, has poor evacuation plans,
whatever and very – perhaps very poor people living in the volcano, not so many
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communication systems. They’ve got the same exposure but they’re very much more
vulnerable. So if we really wanted to assess the true risk we’d have to take that into
account as well, but that’s a difficult thing to do, how you measure that. So at the
moment we just do it by a very simple thing, how many people live round the
volcano, or how many roads are there above some level, how many airports are there,
where’s the hospitals, those sort of simple things you can quantify, where are the
exposed elements. So that’s the sort of – as I say, that’s what we’re sort of aiming
that the global volcano model will enable people to do. So it’s not just that you can’t
do it, it’s that actually you can’t – the evidence base on which you could do it isn’t
even there. So we have to create the databases which allow you to do that sort of, you
know, sort of basic risk assessment.
And does this project have a role in trying to boost the kind of – the scientific
capability in less developed countries that are affected by volcanoes?
Yes. In fact the principle reason the World Bank gave us the study was that they
wanted to know which of these countries was basically in quite good shape to deal
with their volcanoes and which weren’t. I mean, they didn’t ask us that explicitly but
we were writing the report for World Bank economists and that’s really at the back of
their mind is, if you go to Columbia and Guatemala, which of those countries is best –
is going to be able to cope with a future eruption. They’ve both got lots of volcanoes.
But if you look at Columbia you will find that a lot of their high risk volcanoes are
really well monitored and they’re quite sophisticated. If you go to Guatemala you’ll
find a really poor monitoring capacity and they don’t even monitor at all some of their
high risk volcanoes close to big populations. So, you know, you’re a World Bank
economist, you might – well, I don’t know how they think but I mean, you would
think, well, Columbia seems to do reasonable sensible things with the money that they
get for aid or loans from the World Bank, they invest in their science and their
institutions and they, you know, they’re relatively sophisticated, they do a – in this
particular context they do quite a good job, well, maybe we should put – that’s a place
worth continuing to invest in. Guatemala, well, they clearly need capacity building
but then maybe the governance issues in Guatemala are very difficult and therefore
that’s not a – they’re going to have to take into account other issues, aren’t they, with
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– so they might invest in – give them a lot of seismometers but nobody looks after
them, or something like that. So it’s information that’ll inform their loans because
since the Asian tsunami the World Bank has basically – the disaster risk reduction
issue has raised right up the scale of organisations like the UN and the World Bank,
that we really have to do much better at reducing the impact of natural hazards and
disasters. And so this is part of the sort of information which informs that sort of
policy debate.
[39:41]
So – which does actually – there is something I probably should say but it’s – because
I think for me it’s very personally satisfying, is my younger son, who I sort of
mentioned right early on, he didn’t – he went – he didn’t really show much interest in
my area until he went in the field with me. He went to Chile and helped with some
fieldwork and he came to Montserrat. And he then went to Plymouth University to do
a geography degree and he got very interested in development and – development
issues and after he’d finished his degree in Plymouth, he said – he did his project on
Montserrat actually, about the impact of the eruption on the – so he went out to
Montserrat and looked at the impact of the eruption on the people and things like that
for his undergraduate thesis. And then he sort of looked, you know, like a lot of
people, they looked – he looked round and got a sort of rather dull job in an insurance
company for part time, and then he did voluntary work for something called Tree Aid
which is a Sub Saharan African charity and he did that with some paid, you know,
sort of intern thing. Did that for a bit, then he got a job with a charity called Send a
Cow, which is again an agricultural project. He then decided to do an MSc at
Reading in sustainable livelihoods and development, got that, did some fieldwork in
Uganda with farmers and now he’s now working in a company called Development
Initiatives and he’s now become the sort of – the expert in this group, this
organisation, which analyses disaster and humanitarian aid and he’s now their disaster
expert. So he’s producing reports which he’s given to – he went to New York to –
with a colleague to present this report to the UN in New York and he’s been to
Geneva. So he’s now suddenly – our sort of interests, you know, are overlapping
quite strongly. I mean, he’s interested in disaster risk reduction and he’s sort of more
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looking at it from an economic point of view, but it’s really quite interesting. So it’s
been very nice that he’s sort of moved into something that overlaps a bit with, you
know, some of my work.
Are you able to discuss this with him then?
Oh yes, yes. I mean, I actually, you know, sort of read some of his stuff and then sort
of make some suggestions and things about it. But what he’s done is very interesting
because he – Development Initiatives, his company, basically they are funded by
government, Swedish, Canadian, British, to create information databases and analyse
that information on humanitarian aid, who’s spending it, what are they spending it on,
where are they spending it. And governments like that because then that’s
information they can use to inform their aid strategy. And he’s looking at the problem
that everyone thinks that if you spend much more money on disasters by pre-empting
them and being prepared, that would be money much better spent than just spending it
on emergency relief. But almost all the aid money goes into emergency relief. I
mean, it’s literally ninety-nine percent. And the governments since the Hyogo
Framework have said that – many governments have signed up to the idea that out of
the ten percent of the total aid – the idea is ten percent of the total aid budget should
go to disasters, the other ninety percent is all the other aids, humanitarian aid, bit.
And out of that ten percent, ten percent of that ten percent should go to preparedness
and preparing for disasters in communities before the disaster happens. And he’s
been analysing this data and he’s been able to show very nicely that – well, firstly that
almost no government has met that commitment first and then even the money that
has met that commitment is spent on places which have just had a disaster. So almost
all of that money is spent on Haiti, Pakistan and Thailand, where they’ve just had a
disaster [laughs]. So it’s still reactive, not proactive. So his work’s going in a very
interesting direction so I’m sort of having a lot of sort of fun interacting with him on
that.
[44:35]
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And would you like finally just to say how your – is this your younger son you’re
talking about now?
That’s the younger son, yeah.
How your older son’s career developed. I think we last discussed him at the point
that he was a teenager.
Yeah, he’s a totally different character. And what’s interesting is he probably did a
bit better at school than the younger one but he has a very different approach to life.
He’s just been married. And he worked – he got a degree in geography as well at
Leeds and then he worked for several years in an insurance company and I think was
doing alright, you know, sort of – but found it terribly dull. He loves football and
outdoor things and he decided this really wasn’t for him. And so he’s – he went –
decided – he quit his job, he went off to Australia for a few months, came back, met
his new wife, who he’s just married. This is about four years ago. And he said,
‘Well, I’m going to become an electrician.’ So he’s trained himself up as an
electrician and so he’s now a qualified electrician and he works – he’s got a well paid
job for BT but it’s actually a bit – he’s got a dilemma. He’s got a job which is really
well paid but it’s actually rather dull. He changes switches for internet connections
for BT and it’s all night work. So he gets really well paid and a lot of it’s night work,
because you want the internets to be – changed, you know, a customer says they want
their provider changed, you have to do that at night when they’re not – so he gets this
– it’s really well paid and he wants to become an electrician, so he’s – sort of
sometimes during the day he’s going around with a mate he knows sort of – he’s got
pals now in the – he’s met people and he now gets jobs for doing electrical work in
houses and things. But of course he can’t do – he’d really like to quit this well paid
job and do that [laughs] but he can’t. So he’s – so that’s what he’s done. So he’s
gone into a sort of very non – if you like, you know, a very different direction, if you
like, a non academic direction. So he’s …
[End of Track 7]