 Now, as some of you know, I've moved into a new place. I've shown you some of it and the moving process or in the comic books and whatnot. And I've shown you some of the plants that we have, but there's a fair bit of variety of plants that we have that I haven't shown you, which is on the premises of the property. Sort of the place that we're renting. We're renting unfortunately, we're not owning the space, but we're renting long term. And the place we moved into, they have a lot of trees, a lot of different fruit trees, and just edible medicinal plants in the yard. One of them was a fig tree that we've already harvested some figs, that's some delicious figs, rosemary, and whatnot. But one tree that's on the premises is an elderberry tree. And we just harvested some elderberries. Let me show you this. And this is from the yard, right? So we took this from the yard. And what we're going to do with this is make liqueur. Every year, during the summertime, there's this little bit of harvest, whatever we end up harvesting from the neighborhood or we buy or we grow. We take a little bit of that and we make liqueurs. And one of the ones I've made that I'm sipping on right now is a lemon liqueur that we made, which is absolutely amazing. And this thing, the liqueur for this is, I've had it for about 10 years. I cut up a whole bunch of lemons, organic lemons at one time where I bought them and ended up doing, just buying some vodka. And I usually make my liqueurs with vodka, and sugar and putting it all into a jar and putting the vodka on top. And you just let it, I don't know what that word for it is, but basically builds up, right? Over the years it gets stronger and stronger and stronger. And one way I like drinking it, I crush up ice and just pour the liqueur directly on top and you just sip this for a long time. And that's what we're going to do right now. We're going to prep the elderberries to make some liqueur. So basically, and they're very fragile, the elderberries. Okay, they're little guys. I'll show you. So I'm going to take the elderberries from here and just put them in a glass jar that we have, right? And then later on we're going to take, you know, just give them a quick wash and take these mixable sugar, pour some vodka on top and close the container, the jar that, you know, we have a whole bunch of jars. We're going to put it in there and let it cure, I guess, for, you know, a while, for months or years actually. These lemon, this lemon liqueur that I have is for years. I've got blackberry. From the crab apples, I didn't make any crab apple liqueur, but I did make some blackberry and blueberry jam as well after making the crab apple paste. So I made liqueur out of that as well, okay? And while we're doing this, I thought I'd answer a question that came my way, a request that came my way. It came twice. I'm not sure if the same person or two different people, but thank you for the request because, you know, I'm making this video. I'm going to talk about this a little bit because it's something that I love, which is, you know, the request for the video was, you know, talk about being a geophysicist because for about 10 years during the 1990s, I functioned as a geophysicist. My main gig was a geophysicist. I got my degree as a geophysicist with a minor in mathematics, and I worked in the field for about 10 years traveling across Canada and the United States, some parts of the United States, but all over Canada, and it was amazing and I loved it. So one person specifically that I remember said that they were, you know, thinking about becoming a geophysicist or we're going to become a geophysicist and they wanted to know what it was like. So, you know, let's just talk about that a little bit. I'll happily talk to you about, you know, anything to do with geophysics because I love it. It was amazing and I thought it was, you know, by luck and by some personal choices I ended up becoming, you know, getting this education and working in the field. Okay. So I'm going to clean my elderberries and I'll, I'm not sure where we're going to go with this. I do want to tell you how I got into it because it's related to education. And here's the, there's the elderberries, right? Super cool. And you can eat them. Okay. And they taste okay, but they're not strong flavored. And I read up online the family the elderberries come from. I didn't know this. I read the toxicology part of it and it said that like a lot of different fruits, some fruits like apples, apple seeds contain, I believe, cyanide. So if you eat a lot of apple seeds, you know, you'll get sick. And from what I understand, from what, you know, I'm going to follow this up, but from what the little write-up said, these things, right, contain a little bit of cyanide. So it's not a good idea to eat a lot of these, I guess. So what we're going to do is we are going to make liqueur from this. I'm not sure if this is these types of elderberries that also fit into that category. And some of these branches, it was sort of mid-season or end-season, some of the, some of the little branches only have a little bit and there are some here that, you know, they're very full. So supposedly you're supposed to cook these if you're going to eat them, cook them a little bit to, you know, make them not so toxic. But we're going to make liqueur from them. You know, there are recipes online of how to make liqueur. And what we're going to do is basically take vodka and take sugar and put these things in a jar, wash them, put them in a jar and put the sugar on top and pour the vodka over top of that and let it sit there, right? So let me tell you how I got into geophysics. Okay, I think look at these things. This is beautiful. Like they're beautiful, shiny black. So while we're doing this, let me tell you how I got into studying geophysics. And it was just by luck. I just happened to take a course in high school where the teacher was amazing. And it's basically the reason I got into doing geophysics was because of this teacher. And a few years after that, after doing geophysics, 10, 12 years after that, I ran into the teacher and I told him that he inspired me to get into geophysics and I thanked him for it. It was a pretty cool moment, actually, being able to thank someone who guided you in a certain direction that paid off, right? But basically I was taking an Earth Science course, Earth Science 11 at high school. And as far as I'm concerned, Earth Science should be a mandatory course in high school. It teaches us about the home that we live in, the planet Earth. And I learned a lot and I used a lot of that stuff in the real world like weather patterns and learning about the geography of the Earth, where I was and what I could expect. There was a lot to it, right? So it was a fantastic course and the teacher was teaching, you know, the follow-up to Earth Science was geology, geology in grade 12. So because I liked the teacher, I took the geology course as well. And, you know, I was into sciences, so I was already full-loaded sciences with chemistry, mathematics, and physics, 12. But I ended up taking geology as well because of this teacher. And during the process, during the year, this teacher, you know, we looked at geology. Earth Science was more general about meteorology, astronomy. The astronomy stuff was amazing for Earth Science. But geology was more focused on Earth formations, rocks and minerals to a certain degree how things formed, right? And during the year, I can't remember if it was the middle, the beginning, or when it was, basically the topic of geophysics came up, the word geophysics came up, and I, you know, it didn't really ring to me too much at the beginning because I hadn't heard the word geophysics too much. But it interests me because I was taking physics at the same time. I like mathematics. Or let me rephrase, I had a very, I never really had a good math feature, so I just knew mathematics was important to learn. So I gave it weight, I gave it interest, right? So geophysics was intriguing to me, and I remember in class, you know, the teacher was asking, was not asking, was talking about geology and geophysics and stuff like this and, you know, jumping between the two words and I, you know, I was in high school, I was in grade 12. I didn't know really what the difference was. So I raised my hand and I asked the teacher, you know, what's the difference between a geophysicist and a geologist? And I can't remember if he gave an intricate explanation or just what I remember. But the thing that I remember were, what he said was, the difference between a geologist and a geophysicist is, a geologist knows where oil should be and a geophysicist knows how to find it. That's what stuck with me. I don't know if he talked about it for five minutes, ten minutes, half an hour or he just said that, and that was it. But that's what I remember, that's what I retain. And for me, it was more important to be able to do something than to know how to do something. So early on, I lucked out and decided to pursue geophysics. So when I went to university, first year of university, I signed up for the geophysics program. I signed up for the geophysics program at a university where the geophysics was very theoretical. So I remember, you know, it was combined, when you signed up for the geophysics program, it was a combined course. I believe the first semester you took geology, in the second semester you took geophysics or vice versa. But I did the geology part. I remember doing the geology part, it was very similar to geology 12. It was really easy because a lot of people hadn't taken geology 12 or didn't have the opportunity to take geology 12. And I remember taking the geophysics course, the geophysics segment. And it was okay, intrigued me. There was a lot to it. There weren't too many people taking the course. Here's another one that's like pretty fuller. There weren't too many people in the class. So it wasn't one of the big auditoriums where you're taking calculus or chemistry or physics first year where, you know, you're sitting in a room with 200, 300 people. This was maybe like a high school class size, 20 people, 25 people, 15 people. But I remember the course required us to memorize a lot. Memorize a lot of formulas. There was a lot of proofs involved in the course where I remember one of the proofs we had to do, we basically had to regurgitate three pages. There was three pages of proving a formula that we basically had to memorize because no one really understood what we were doing. It was just monkey see, monkey do. And we'll go through the hoops and just... It was ridiculous. I didn't like it. I thought it was useless and it was useless because I didn't understand what the formulas represented. I knew some of them, but a lot of them would say, you know, if you've ever done proofs of anything, you know, there's a concept you're trying to prove. You start with one equation on one side and another equation on the other side and you bring in other equations. You know, left side, right side. You know, you do substitutions, and put things in and combine equations. At the end, hopefully you get the left side equal on the right side so you prove that this thing existed. You know, there's a lot of assumptions in the process. So it was... It just didn't make sense to me to memorize this thing without knowing what was happening. So after finishing my first year university, and I wasn't really into it, so I didn't do well in the calculus. I failed first year calculus, right? I barely went to class and I thought I could cram and I couldn't cram. I failed first year English, but I did really well in what I liked in the geology and geophysics, right? I got, you know, A's in the geology and I believe A in the geophysics, right? So after the first year, I sort of took a break. I took some other courses just to see what, you know, business and arts was like and I worked a little bit and made a little bit of money and traveled a little bit. And then I went into geophysics again at a different university, not through the physics department, but through the earth science department. Because earth science was the course, really, that I thought was one of the most important courses I took in high school. So I took geophysics from the earth science department and we ended up doing a lot of geology, but there was a lot of geophysics involved as well. Some mathematics, some physics, right? Not a lot. It was a very hands-on program. The first place I took just, you know, I know the questions are going to be coming, so might as well preemptively answer these. The first year I went to university, I went to UBC, that's where I took it for a year and then took a year off. So at UBC, back in the late 1980s, it was very, you know, through the physics department, it was very theoretical. And then I went to Waterloo, University of Waterloo in the late 1980s and I went through the earth science department, right? So we ended up doing a lot of geology, a lot of environmental work, a lot of hydrogeology, a lot of geophysics, some mathematics, some statistics, some physics, right? It wasn't as math and physics heavy as I had liked. So what I ended up doing was I did some extra work to get my minor in mathematics. So I took some extra courses and ended up getting a geophysics degree. From the earth science department, geophysics degree was a minor in mathematics and I worked my ass off for that minor. I really did. I had to take some serious courses that I didn't have to prerequisites for that I had to learn on my own and stuff like this. And as far as I know, I was the first person from the earth science department to get a major in geophysics with a minor in mathematics. I'm not sure if that's true. I remember from the time I looked at it and since the program had been introduced, I think it was like 10 years or something, the program was the first person to do it, which was pretty cool. And one of the reasons I really worked my ass off to do this because I thought it sounded amazing, right? Geophysics degree with minor in mathematics. That's not bad. I liked the way that flowed and I like mathematics. I knew it was powerful. I knew I wanted to take some more mathematics courses. So that's what I ended up doing. Now, quickly on, into my geophysics education at Waterloo, at the university where I went into it from the earth science department, I decided that I wanted to do environmental geophysics. So the oil thing, even at high school when my teacher said geophysicists know how to find oil, geologists know where oil should be found, I wasn't really interested in oil. Oil didn't really pique my interest. I just thought that was cool to be able to know how to do something. In university, I quickly decided that I wanted to get into environmental geophysics. I really focused on the environmental part of it. Hydrogeology, and environmental geophysics back in the late 1980s, early 1990s, it was fairly small. There wasn't too many people in it. I was lucky enough I was in a co-op program. I was lucky enough for my second work term. I ended up working for an environmental geophysics company and I learned a lot there. I just learned more in the semester of working that I did regarding environmental geophysics in a couple of years of studying. So I learned a lot and right away I decided I wanted to go into that field. I was like, this is how much we've got so far. So I decided to become an environmental geophysicist and I did some work in other fields as well. Obviously you have to do some geotech stuff and some exploration stuff, some labs, all that stuff got exposed a lot. But coming out, I didn't plan on going anywhere else other than environmental. The way I ended up getting my first gig, major gig out of university, that basically is the company I worked for for the next 10 years, 9, 10 years, doing environmental geophysics, the way I ended up getting that job was through running into someone, one of my mentors, Mark, if by chance you see this, thank you, you taught me a lot. So basically, what basically happened was when I finished my last exam of my four or five year degree of pretty heavy program of learning geophysics, getting my major in geophysics and writing multiple math exams and taking multiple math courses to get my minor in mathematics, the last exam I wrote of my university career, okay, I had a big grin on my face walking out of there because I knew I was done. Sleeve deprived, making my way back to the residence I was staying in and flying out the next day. So I'm walking back to my residence and in the parking lot, I run into my mentor, one of my mentors, lifetime mentors really, through work, through everything really, ran into him that I had work with in a previous co-op term, in a semester, right? I had worked with him and I ran into him in the parking lot, big grin on my face and he turned to me and said, well, Chichou for you, right? Chichou, what are you doing? I said, if you just finished my last exam and back to your department, pack up my things, speedy Gonzales style and I'm flying out tomorrow. And he goes, no, no, no, no, no, I need you. I asked him what he meant. He says, look, he says you finished, what did you get? You get geophysics, you got your degree, I got my degree, I'm 100% sure I got my degree. And he said, okay, give me your resume, you're hired. And I was like, no, you don't understand. I just finished the hardcore program. I wasn't going into starting work right away. I needed a break. And I told him this and he said, no, you don't understand, just give me your resume and you're hired. And I said, look, I don't even have a resume. And I didn't. I finished my exam and I just wanted out and I wanted a break. So I hadn't even made a resume. I said, look, he goes, just go put something together, give it to me, you're hired. Whenever you want, you can start. I couldn't turn that down, right? So I went, I went to my apartment and, you know, and at the time, you know, access to computers wasn't as, you know, no one had easy, easy access to computers the way we do now, right? Home computers were expensive, extremely expensive, especially for a student, right? So you had to get computer accounts at university and stuff like this and a lot of labs were closed. So basically what I ended up doing was going to, at the time, like a local place in a strip mall at the university where, you know, they had access to computers and, you know, software, computers like 286, 386, like really old school pentiums or whatever they were. I think the pentiums were out then. So I put together a really ridiculous resume with typos in it and I dropped it off for him and I took off. And he tracked me down. I was in Waterloo. That's where, like, you know, I was going to school, Waterloo, Ontario, south of Toronto, right? So, I, I had found my way. It was a couple of months later. I was in California at the time in San Diego or near San Diego. Actually, Los Angeles. I was in Los Angeles. No, actually it was in San Francisco. Sorry. I was in San Francisco, I believe. It was in San Francisco, LA and he tracked me down and I called him back. You know, he sent out a message through family and I called him back and I said, hey, what's going on? And he said, where are you? And I told him I was in California. You know, I think Los Angeles, maybe. I said I was in Los Angeles and he said, what are you doing there? I need you here, which was Ontario. Right? Check out the bee hovering the elderberries. Right? That's cool there. So, he said, I need you here. I go, I need you here. He goes, I need you the next day after you gave me a resume. And I was like, dude, okay, I'll be there as soon as I can. He goes, look, be here by next week, at least. I go, okay, I'll try to be there. So, what I ended up doing is, you know, my funds were limited, right? So, I ended up catching a bus, midnight bus, graveyard, 18 hour bus ride on the ground, all the way to Vancouver, BC, Canada, from California. And then from there, I caught a plane to Ontario and I worked as a geophysicist. And what had happened is, he was working, he had got a position for one of the largest geotechnical companies in the world, international. And he had started a geophysics branch of this company. He was a solo guy, specifically environmental related, right? And in Canada, he was the only one working as a geophysicist for this company. And this company has multiple branches across Canada, across the United States, across the world, Australia, New Zealand, all over the place. Thousands of employees, right? So, he had started on a satellite office, one man solo operation, trying to sell the idea that environmental geophysics had a place in this conglomerate, multinational geotechnical company, right? That they could bring in the revenues. And that was what I wanted to get into. It was ideal. It's by luck, by circumstance, by, you know, working with him. And he knew what I was capable of and usually when I take on a project, that is maybe if, you know, I've learned to really focus on something, on a specific thing and I work my ass off. When I work with him, during the co-op term where I work with him with a different company, so he trusted me and he had mentored me, right? So for four months, I learned from him how to be a geophysicist, right? So he molded me and he knew what I was capable of and by luck, we ran into each other at the right time for both of us because he had just gone into his company trying to sell geophysics. So, just to make, you know, just to make it shown that this is viable option program that this company should offer and he needed my help, right? He needed me to be there to do a lot of the grunt work and so he could, you know, and he could dump a project on me and, you know, make sure that I would put my heart and soul into it. He knew what I wanted to get into. So I hooked up with him and we started working as together, you know, he was my boss and he had bosses, but he was really the one I had to answer to and he was a hard ass. He was a hard ass and I was cocky and I thought I knew a lot because I can honestly tell you have geophysics, if you're thinking about going into it and if you are into it, it's, you know, and there's different geophysics there's different types of geophysicists you can envy, okay? There's different areas of geophysicists you can go to, just like anything, any embrace that has, you know, it's fairly large umbrella that you can approach it in different ways, right? You can be theoretical geophysicists, you can work as an astronomer, right? You can go into meteorology, you can go into exploration, you can go into oil, resource extraction, you can go into oceanography, right? Or you can go into the environmental aspect of it and I love the environmental aspect of it I saw a need for it it was where my heart was and it allowed me to do a lot of solo be my own, you know, smaller and sometimes larger, right? So we started working together and just to give you an idea of what he expected and how cocky I was, I guess if you've gone through university, if you've gone through high school, any type of centralized formal education you'll know that in general the lower level you are you know, a lot of the courses you take they're not really relevant they try to give you a broad point of view of, you know, they try to give you a really broad view of broad education, right? High school, graduating from high school they're just trying to indoctrinate program people into fitting some kind of mold when you get your bachelors from university you're sort of, you know, expanding on that and focusing on some kind of field and applying things that, you know, you've learned or you've been trained to do, right? When you go into masters you're sort of on the cusp of sort of new ideas and doing field work and trying to own something, right? Trying to fully understand something and when you're getting your PhD you're basically contributing new ideas and new ideas happen in the master's level and bachelors level as well but that's the main focus with PhD you're introducing a new concept a new perspective into a certain field, right? So for bachelors, you know, which I got is sort of going in there using what you know, right? And, you know, I learned certain things coming out of university and geophysics for, oh, the wind is picking up hopefully the microphone is not creating a lot of wind noise but for geophysics for those of you who don't know or for those of you who are in it you can basically break it down into sort of a step-wise system especially the environmental aspect of it but you can also focus this on geotechnical or any other geophysics or any other field, really basically in geophysics what the steps are you sort of work on proposals if you're higher level up in the system that you can write proposals so, you know, you write proposals you give presentations you go collect data you process data you analyze the data and you present reports to your clients and I've sort of done I've been lucky enough I was in it long enough to go through all those phases where I would write proposals for projects talk to the clients get the projects go into the field collect the data come back process the data analyze the data present the data write the reports and talk to the clients if need be give presentations or what not so that was very cool going through the whole stream but at the beginning when I started working I wasn't doing that proposals I wasn't involved in because it takes a while to start writing proposals because you have to know every aspect of the work involved so I was sort of involved involved in initially learning how to collect data at university I learned and I'm pretty meticulous with my work so I collect good data and I like data so I analyze good data so those two areas I was not bad in I still needed fine tuning a little bit especially knowing how to function in the field because it's really important to know what the do's and don'ts are in the field because if you do the wrong thing in the field you might not come out of there right like construction sites or the wild, the bush industries factories there's a lot of activity in those areas there's a lot of dangers in those areas and I've known people who've died in the field right in the company we knew people two people one for sure I'm pretty sure there were two that the person made the wrong step just wrong turn and he got run over by by dump truck so you have to know what you're doing so the first thing you need to learn as a geophysicist really the first thing you need to learn is how to live through the learning process long enough to become a good geophysicist right so really pay attention to the safety concerns of wherever you're going to wherever the field may be if it's nature make sure you take the nature training programs make sure you listen to the people telling you where to go where not to go how to deal with wildlife if you're working in industry in brine pits near brine pits or landfills or construction sites make sure you pay attention and you got your you're listening, you're watching you're careful I learned that fast because when I was growing up in high school it was around construction so for me it came naturally I've worked in just through family I've worked in construction sites since I was 13 probably so it sort of became innate for me collecting data I always like because with geophysics what you end up doing is you use computers technology to basically probe into the earth or into space or the atmosphere and try to figure out what's going on and that always interested me so I was good with technology and I was good with instruments so I could collect good data I was very patient you have to be patient to be able to collect good data so those two areas I learned quickly how to do I wasn't involved initially in writing reports so we would go out to a field and he showed me how it took me under his wing again my mentor and he showed me how he wanted grids laid out, how he wanted data collected what do's and don'ts were and within a week I was going out on myself and setting stuff up and collecting data and bringing everything back if you want to know about data actually we did do one video of how I showed you I collect data with when we're setting up the 10 by 10 grid so if you want to know how environmental geophysicists almost all environmental geophysicists have come across unless you're running with the GPS system at the time in the late 1980s or early 1990s this would have been early 1990s you don't want to collect so many instruments it's just extra instruments you're carrying and if you're using electromagnetic methods they add more noise factor you weren't really using geophysics you weren't usually using GPS systems when you're collecting data with a grid but in that video I sort of show how I set up most of my grids in the field like 99% of the grids I set up in the field using triangulation not triangulation but Pythagorean theorem so basically I would go to the field and collect data and then bring them back processed data using different types of software and sometimes right now the software runs pretty fast back then if you're doing creaking you're trying to contour data and stuff like this you're running stuff with batch files over the weekend you set up your batch files you work on it during the week you set up your batch files for Friday and press the enter button hopefully it runs properly and gives you the output you have the output Monday morning sometimes you go into the office on the weekends make sure the batch file is running well and stuff like this so there's a lot of things you need to take care of I'm saying I'm going off on tangents all over the place and if you're you're studying geophysics hopefully you appreciate when I'm all the tangents I'm going down but one of the places that really, really I got schooled in that I needed reprogramming and education and was writing reports after a few weeks my boss my mentor asked me to write the final report for this project it was like a $3,000 project or something one day field work doing electromagnetic methods EM to collect data on a grid and analyze it and find buried drums simple during the early 1990s where there's a lot of gas stations early 1990s, mid 1990s and picked up a lot later on where a lot of places, gas stations were old construction sites houses they were trying to remove what do you call it gas tanks and stuff that were buried from decades ago because they were leaking so he asked me to write this report I wrote the reports I was cocky I thought I was doing well I want to collect the data one day I came back, processed the data next day and one day or two days and created AutoCAD drawings and contour maps running different software and ended up writing the report and gave him the report and I was sitting on my computer doing other work processing other data or something and within half an hour or an hour my boss came and stood at my cubicle and my cubicle I was sitting on the thing and he took my report and plopped it down on the desk and said Gicho what the hell is this looked at him and I sort of went and he goes what the hell is this so I picked it up and started flipping through it and at university I had never gotten anything back that had so many red marks on it okay it was crazy it was just red marks and arrows and he looked at me and I looked all of a sudden my ego dropped went off a cliff and he looked at me and said look this is not academics you're not here trying to use fancy words and stuff to say something that could be said in three words you're not going to write a paragraph to say this whatever it is you're trying to say a whole page where you can say it in a single sentence right our clients are not looking for fictional story they're not looking for fluffy words they're looking to find out what's going on with their investments right and he said basically look at start reading the reports that he had done over the years right since he started this project over the last year I guess or six months or eight months and copy those use a lot of cut and paste and put in the appropriate information and you know write the few paragraphs that need to be written and condense it basically get rid of like 80% of what I had written so that was one aspect of working as a geophysicist that I learned quickly which is if you're working as a geophysicist you're not there to write essays you're there to take the data you've collected to take the situation what you understand of the field and of the situation analyze data process the data process the data analyze the data and present the data using as few steps as possible to get as much of the idea as you can across okay that was sort of the beginning of my experience as a geophysicist and I did this for a number of years and I did you know I remember when and you know I got the job and initially usually most companies you go to large companies you go to you're basically on a three month three month probation period so after my three month probation period where you know I was fitting in I was liking what I was doing my bosses and my other bosses office manager and stuff like this people that ended up working with they liked me I fit into the group atmosphere and this was a satellite office that this multinational conglomerate had so you know it was a small office and I was really lucky starting off there because I learned a lot from everyone I work with and basically after the three months probation period they came up to me and said okay you know I could order my own business cards because up to that point I was using generic business cards geophysicist and my name wasn't on there I was handing them my bosses card right getting them you know getting those people to contact us through my boss because he was the filter okay so they you know they asked me what I wanted on my card I gave him my name obviously and as the title I wanted environmental geophysicist and I remember the first time I said this environment to geophysicist my boss my mentor turned to me and said listen that really restricts you right if you say geophysics you can do anything people understand that you're a geophysicist you know you could do oil you could do exploration resource you could do anything you want to do environmental geophysicist you're mainly going to be focuses on environmental geophysicist and I told them that's exactly what I want and as far as I know right I don't know this is 100% true or not but I didn't know anyone else that I come across any other geophysicist that I come across and it's a pretty closed community there weren't you know there weren't too many geophysicists at the time when I was doing this there's a fair bet I guess if you can look at it as such a niche market but overall as you know compared to several engineers electrical engineers you know mathematicians if you compare it there's very few people like numbers wise that go have geophysics as their title geophysicist as their title and I never came across anyone with this but I was the only one that I know of at the time that had environmental geophysicist written on the business cards which I thought was awesome I liked it I loved it actually so I started working as an environmental geophysicist and doing that I specialized in electromagnetic and magnetic methods my bachelor's thesis was the title was using Euler's equations, Euler's Deconvolution to pinpoint the depth of magnetic anomalies in the ground specifically environmental barrels, pipes, buried metal because it was a test site that we had at the university where I was able to go on there and collect EM and MAG data over a dense dense grid it was a small grid it was I can't remember how big it was maybe 100 by 50 or 200 by 100 grid where they had buried pipes and barrels and metallic objects, metallic sheets and stuff like this because that's a lot in environmental geophysics one of the things we ended up doing is trying to find buried drums or map contaminated plumes or find leaks in the ground usually near surface for environmental you go maybe with radar and seismics I've gone a lot deeper you go into the 10s I can't remember how deep I went it was less than 100 meters we did some seismic work where we're trying to more geotechnical involved we're trying to do geophysics for building brine ponds some of the work I did was geotechnical the dams around lakes that they were building they were going to dump tailings so some of that stuff was deeper down I did a lot of radar associated with that and some seismic and some electromagnetic as well less so mag and gravity but basically my bachelor's thesis was collecting data on a very dense grid and it was collecting data every half a meter by half a meter of mag and EM data trying to find these anomalies you know pinpoint them and specifically using a new program that had come up through a company I worked with the work I did was with one of the larger companies the software companies that was also producing equipment that they were it was a new module for a program called creating contours creating gridding program that they had to create maps and process data so it was really cool with doing that I got involved with a lot of different people and it was really awesome once I got into the field to have environmental geophysicists on my business cars and I really loved it and I ended up doing a lot of environmental geophysics traveling all over the place a lot of places by myself into the bush into the field working from all temperatures from in Canada minus 30 degrees plus with the windshield to in Canada plus 30 degrees with the heat and the humidity so extreme temperatures but amazing amazing gives you a lot of time as a geophysicist if you're doing this type of work to really meditate to think because it's a lot of it is very once you start doing it it's I guess it's the word the methodical you really think about what you're going to do you lay down the grid and it's very routine really you just have to make sure you're doing the mathematics properly and it's pretty straight forward and once you set up the grids you know you collect your data and collecting data is not the most exciting thing to do especially when it comes to E.M. and MAG methods where you get to put on a lot of miles I walked a lot and it's very routine where you take a few steps to collect data take a few steps to collect data or one or two steps to collect data press a button look at your data and once you start doing that it sort of becomes hypnotic and you let your mind wander you think about different things like art, politics, economics and you have the opportunity to grow as a human being that's the way I looked at it that's the way I treated it and it was amazing I liked it and it kept me in shape and that's one thing you need to be as a geophysicist if you're going to the field one of the safety factors and one of the health factors you have to be in shape you're going to be working with a lot of equipment some heavy where some heavy that you have to lug around and it's amazing experience keeps you in shape and it was a lot of fun I saw a lot one of my most amazing experiences occurred in Labrador Newfoundland near Nain and it's northern Canada and it's amazing crazy terrain you know I live, I grew up in the west coast of British Columbia and it's a rainforest and you get gigantic trees here really huge trees I've seen the Redfoot Forest in California and I'm used to old trees being very very large very very big but in Labrador right when I went to you would see trees that were as high as you were like six feet tall that were like 300 years old because the growing season was so short that this is all they grew the rings around these trees were really really thin and they were extremely old and very sparse they didn't look lush the terrain is oh wow I forget my geological terms pre-Cambier and basalt it's just rough rock cliffs amazing with you know there's metamorphic most of it a lot of it metamorphic a lot of it igneous a lot of the metamorphic rocks you see it's sedimentary rocks that are layered that got distorted and you see basically if you want to think about a mathematical term you see parabolas and curves and polynomials right I forget all the terminology geological formations that you get right but they're amazing and when you collect specifically at this place where I was in amazing experiences I was doing a radar there penetrating really deep into the ground and we're seeing the formations the rock formations, the curves, the parabolas basically the polynomial equations in the bedrock it was amazing it was amazing so the data part the collecting data part was fantastic analyzing this data presenting this data but one of the most amazing aspects of it was the terrain that I got exposed to and the nature I got exposed to one of the things that we did we're at this and I don't know if the mine is still going at the time it was the largest nickel mine in the world it was going to produce 80% of the world's nickel I believe and it was basically a huge camp where people from all walks of life went there to do their work there were a lot of geophysics I was one person there I was sent there with two different people sort of people that were in the co-op that were doing a term and one person that was newly hired that I had as helpers basically helping me to do radar there and then there's a lot of miners there's a lot of people doing geotechnical work there's just a lot of everything geophysics group we were one of the smaller ones and we got placed on an icebreaker now we were there towards the end of August so we were living off the icebreak we were stationed in a bay there was no ice around all the ice had gone but in the winter time we would get iced over and that's why they needed an icebreaker there because you couldn't be there otherwise I was there in late August early September and during that time in that area you get black flies, you get mosquitoes in northern Canada the bugs are incredible the black flies what's the saying they carry horses away or something like this like there were days where we were going to areas where there was a lot of black flies and mosquitoes I would wear mosquito netting and you would you'd be wearing gloves you have you have your field equipment you wear gloves, you wear mosquito netting and you put duct tape around your wrist where the gloves missed your suit and your ankles and stuff at the end of the day to the icebreaker, wherever you are you take your stuff off and black flies have gone through the duct tape and you have a ring around your wrist of black flies biting you that's how insanely large these black flies are and how aggressive they are so it's incredible and there were some days where like that wow, it was hard work, definitely hard work there were some days where they were there with T-shirts and collecting data and stuff there were a few images few periods, few days that have stuck with me from that trip that I did but one of them was an evening where and we would get flown out I guess I should mention this in the mornings because we were on an icebreaker we were being dropped off in areas with a helicopter so in the evening you have meetings with the different group leaders and because I was the geophysics rep there I guess the highest level person there collecting the data and stuff like this I would attend these meetings with the different groups, different factions that were getting flown off the ship at different times so everybody would get assigned a time when the helicopter was you would have to be on the helicopter and the helicopter would take you and drop you off somewhere and come back and take someone else from another different company to a different location we would get assigned helicopter times in the mornings sometimes we get assigned usually they ask you what time you want to be there and in the summertime when you're doing geophysics you're usually one of the first ones in and one of the last ones out you're staying in there as long as you got daylight we get flown out at like 5am or something like this whenever you know one of the earliest people the helicopters would drop off right so the helicopter lands on the icebreaker you know we load our stuff on to the helicopter tie it up hop on to the helicopter and then the helicopter will fly off and it's amazing looking at the terrain from that high up into the shields the Canadian shields and stuff oh my wow wow wow right and then we get dropped off somewhere some of the places we were getting dropped off they were on slants and they weren't clearings so a couple of times the helicopter would you know fly into a place and land one side one of its you know the helicopters have legs like this right the long I don't know what they call them but they would land one side on a slope right and they're hovering the rest of the time and we would have to throw everything all of our equipment off to the ledge of the slope right and then jump off and when we jumped off they told us this right off the back you know when you jump off lay down on the ground right and when the helicopter takes off and it's clear you can stand up again because if you're on a slope and the helicopter's hovering you throw your equipment on there if you stand up when the helicopter's taken off or during this hovering process when it's got sort of a little at least one little ledge on the ground where it's a little bit more stable if the helicopter does you know loses its balance twist it's going to take off your head so yeah that's why you have to lay down on the ground right I'm assuming this has happened before it didn't happen with us but it was something that we're definitely aware of and as soon as we get dropped off we lay down the ground helicopter we're clear you know we go about our business right and then you come back later in the evening and it's a good timing here we're getting towards the end end of this right and this is how much we've gotten so far today like so we're going to make a liqueur out of this nice so this last little story my greatest one of my greatest memories of being a geophysicist is coming back from one of these days one of you know fields collecting radar data for 12, 14 hours right coming back and at the end of the day when you come back geophysics you're transferring your data you're backing up your data so the people that were helping me out to do this they would eat and go to sleep they were drained they were exhausted I've been doing this for a while so I was you know when I go to the field or when geophysicists go to the field if you're doing this hardcore you're in there you're focused you're doing the job you're getting out as fast as you can right so I would you know set the equipment to be processed and there was a little bit of or transferred over right and there was a little bit of timeline while the computer does its thing where you have some downtime right and when I was doing this we had heard that there was going to be a full lunar eclipse that night okay so it was a dry camp unfortunately so I didn't have any liqueurs or cognac with me but I went up to the top of the icebreaker where we could go to I had Cuban cigars with me at the time I smoked a lot of Cuban cigars I traveled to Cuba came come back with Cuban cigars and stuff right so I went to the top of an icebreaker at like one o'clock in the morning right helicopter is probably picking us up at like 5 o'clock in the morning so one o'clock in the morning on top of an icebreaker clear skies you can see stars galore watching a full lunar eclipse start all the way through at the same time getting spiral auroral borealis with different colors predominantly it was greenish bluish right smoking a Cuban cigar on top of an icebreaker in a bay in Labrador right and the Cuban cigar I had was a large one it was a hoyo de monterey double corona I know this because at the time I was smoking hoyo de monterey double corona is a lot of I got my hands on a lot of hoyo de montereys when I went to Cuba I brought back you're only allowed to bring back two boxes to Canada when you travel somewhere that's 50 cigars I came back with 12 boxes of hoyo de monterey double coronas bought in the official cigar stores at the time and they were cheap at the time each box was $80 right 25 hoyo de monterey double coronas for $80 and I came back with 12 boxes of those I was smoking a lot of hoyo de monterey double coronas that's one of my most amazing experiences as a geophysicist that trip that I went there and we were there for two weeks, two and a half weeks and I was given longer to do it but there was a certain budget when you're doing this type of work you got to stay pretty tight within your budget and I stayed well below my budget and everybody was happy and we were in and out and there was a lot of other things involved with that project so I'll do more updates on geophysicist I'll tell you more stories about some of the geophysicist experiences I've had running into pairs seeing grizzlies some of the environmental work that I did some of the things I came across the good and the bad but that's I guess sort of the introduction to what I was like being a geophysicist some of the experiences where I came from what some of the processes involved in and one of my most memorable memories one o'clock in the morning in Labrador on an icebreaker in a bay in clear skies watching a full lunar eclipse with spirals smoking a Cuban cigar that I brought back recently from Cuba there wasn't really too much missing maybe a nice it was amazing I'll see you guys in the next video bye for now