 Alright we are here today with Dr. James Franklin. We are actually at the Science and Technology Museum 2389 Casarote. It is July 8, 2015 and the interviewer as usual will be William McGrath. So here we go. Could you please state your full name? Pretty momentally. James McWillie, Scottish background, Franklin. And your age? 72. And where were you born? North Bay, Ontario. Okay. And what did your parents do actually? What did your parents come from? Well my mother came from Scotland and came over just after the First World War with part of her family that the rest hadn't been born yet. My grandfather who fought in the First World War, Gastadipra, didn't want to be a tenant farmer in Scotland anymore. Came over, started farming in the Niagara Falls area between Milan and St. Catharines and did that for the rest of his life. My mother was born there and became a nurse. My father was born in Maxwell, Ontario, just to the east of the sea. And he and his entire family of four all went to University which was remarkable in those days considering that his father died when he was the oldest of the family was only 10. And he was a high school teacher. It turns out that remarkably enough I could never figure out for many years how my grandmother managed to afford to send four kids all through university until I discovered that her name before she was married was Boots. And that was part of the Lumber Company family. So she had inherited some money as part of it. And interesting background. And you didn't use it for good? Yeah. So it turns out that my dad's side of the family had a very long history in Eastern Ontario. And his ancestors came over from England in the 1600s. Apparently they do have a family tree somewhere. And the Boots' side of the family of course became the Lumber Company and was what established Ottawa. So your dad was a high school teacher? Yes. What did he teach? Todd History. Yeah, history in English. And he eventually realized that there were thousands of history and English teachers so he did a commercial specialization and taught bookkeeping and accounting mainly and things like that. But his real passion was history. Yeah, as many of us. And your mother? My mother was a nurse. She moved to North Bay because at that time, I guess in the early Depression, the hospital in North Bay paid trainee nurses better than any other hospital that she could find. And being Scottish and careful, she decided that was a good place to go. So she went to North Bay and did her training. Met my dad through some church club that they both belong to and got married. So then eventually I came along. And how many siblings? None. None? Only a child? Yep. Okay. That's pretty rare for that time. It is actually at that time but that was what they decided to do. So what did you do as a child? That's past time or interests? Like most kids, I guess got into a lot of trouble. It's interesting because I was always interested in science and I think a lot of that has to do with teachers that you have. And I had in both public school and in high school, particularly in public school, some really excellent science teachers who got me interested in electronics actually. And that's why I thought of going into electrical engineering and actually started it that way. But you know, so I used to build radios and do things like that and disrupt our television set and do lots of stuff like that. Was there any, what was the big movement at the time or electronic? The big thing at the time was of course the beginnings of space. And the Sputnik, the Russians put up and the Americans following hosts on, all of that was so new. And the development of tiny transistor radios only this big, you know, and the, quite frankly, the advent of television. I mean, you know, we didn't have television till I was in, I guess I'd probably been in high school. I can remember seeing the Ed Sullivan show at Elvis Presley, some of the earliest TV that we got in North Bay. And, you know, this whole whole electronics world that came on was a new threshold in science. And, you know, there were a lot of us that were very enthused by that, the whole business of getting away from wires and being able to do things with tiny electronics and then going to space. So that was as of high school you were very interested in? Yeah, as high school. And I went off to study electrical engineering for one year and discovered that that's not what you would have wanted. And, you know, when you look at people in geoscience, I would bet you that at least a half, if not two-thirds of them, started out the same way. Going into something different, some other branch of science, discovering geology was what they were really interested in and shifting over to. It's true, though, when you think about it, when you look around, not a lot of young people go into geology or think of geology as a profession. In North Bay, it wasn't even offered in high school. I mean, there was no way one would get any background in geology whatsoever. If you took a geography course, you might get a little bit, but I didn't because I was going to go into electrical engineering. So I did physics, chemistry, and math. And French, two Frenches actually, and Latin and English literature and composition, that kind of thing, that's what you did. And you streamed yourself to go into what we call the hard sciences. And I didn't even do biology. And I may have done it in grade 12 or not in grade 13, because I wasn't interested in it. And that, I think, kind of dictated where you're going to go. And the other thing is, coming from a relatively small town, the quality of teaching varied some. And so you were very much affected by those teachers who were really good at what they were good at, and not so affected by those perhaps who were dull. And that's what happened. So where did you go to school for geology? Carlton, actually. I decided to go to Carlton primarily because it was closest university to North Bay. And I switched and went there. And actually, that's not quite true. To tell you the truth, I did my first year at Laurentia in submarine. And they had no second year. So they were just starting the university. And they had not built the campus that they're on now. It's interesting because I was up there the other day, and they didn't realize that I was a graduate of science. Not really, because I only did first year. And I was the only student in geology at Laurentia that was a declared major. The others that were taking the course were in other fields of science. And I was lucky, in a sense, that the guy who was teaching it was actually, as it turns out, a geophysicist. A Harvard train geophysicist had been hired there because he could teach both math and geology. And so he did. And as his only student, he made me his TA. So I helped set up the labs and do all that stuff. So I got enormous education in first year from this guy because he kind of took me under his wing. And we'd been friends ever since. He'd left and joined the geological survey soon after I moved to Carleton. And over the years he became head of SOQUEM, which is the Big Quebec Government Expression Company, then started his own geophysics company which still operates today in out of Quebec City. And he's now retired into prospecting. Edwin Goucher, his name was, son Pierre, now runs GDD as the company and they make geophysicism. But Edwin was a wonderful mentor. And he fell around coldly as a student. And so yeah, so I did first year at Laurentian, realized that I didn't have a program, switched to Carleton in the second year and finished up through Carleton, stayed on to the Masters at Carleton, largely because I was probably too lazy to go anywhere else. And I had had a summer job my second year, my first year in geology. I worked for International Nickel, now Valley Out of Subury, interesting experience. Second year I thought I'd like to work closer to home. There's a company called Geophysical Engineering Surveys, limited in North Bay. It turned up at their door. Christmas said, do you hire any students? They said, well, we need one. They hired me. It turned out they had a small wine at Tomogamy called Copper Fields, Tomogamy Copper. And as it turns out, that company was started by a professor at the University of Toronto. His name was Norman B. Keeville. Norman B. Keeville went on to found tech corporation. So I worked for them that summer. Norm Sr. was the president of the company. He had just left U of D, was trying to be a goal of this small money company, found this wine using a very elementary but interesting geophysical method, found this little copper mine on an island in Lake Tomogamy. It was incredibly high grade, direct shipping or right to the smelter in the Randa. And so I got a summer job there, basically helping a prospector prospect and do a little mapping and learning some of the things, learning geophysical equipment, that sort of stuff. Excellent experience. Some years later, I got curious about the deposit and went back and did my master's thesis on part of it. And that was a great experience for me. Not only that, but by this time, Norm Sr.'s son had finished his PhD, I think at Berkeley or Stanford in theoretical geophysics, and was now moving up on the company. And when I finished my master's thesis, the two of them went over it with me, which was quite an interesting and somewhat sweaty experience because two very brilliant guys. And Norm Jr. now was chairman of the board of tech and the chap we really should interview if you ever get the chance. And they were tremendously supportive. And remarkably enough, about six or eight months ago, I was at a conference and a friend of mine who was a prophet, Colorado School of Minds, had his students with posters at the conference. And one of them was my young lady, the last name of Keebo. Terri Depp was a niece of Norm Sr.'s. And she immediately called up Uncle Norm who remembered me. And I gave her an old copy of my thesis because she spent some of her summers canoeing in the tomography area, the camp family still has. Anyway, very interesting place to be. And I did my master's at tomography and then I decided I'd do a PhD and I started to shop around for various schools, playing very close to going to the United States. But I had, through extremely good luck, after third year, where I'd worked for Hollinger at that time, I went on a field trip which was run by the CIM out of Norando. And it was the first ever field trip to an area called Botogamy Lake in Quebec. I pitched up for this thing. It was in early September, just before classes started. I was the only student. Nice bunch of guys. I didn't know any of them. I went off on this trip and we went on by bus to Botogamy. First night, we're all in the bar at the Botogamy Lake Hotel having beer. Everybody's ordering around, around the table. I take a look at the wall. If I ordered a beer, I wouldn't have had enough money to buy dinner. I said to the guy next to me, I think the bartender will cash him. Jacky said, there's not a whole boy. He said, what's your problem? I told him, he said, oh, students don't buy beer. Go to the washroom and look at the guy next to you to buy it. It turned out that the guy I was talking to, I didn't know at all, was with the Geological Survey of Canada. They told me, cash in your area, take a little driving back to Ottawa, which I did. And on the way back, I asked him about summer work. And he arranged for a couple of interviews for me. And I picked up a summer job working for one of his colleagues. And that completely changed my career because I got into research right there. Working with an absolutely phenomenal chap, and I was Stuart Oskal. This guy, the guy who sent me up as I went to Joe Chamberlain, these were very senior people of the Geological Survey who, it was like going to a university with no students in a sense working in the Geological Survey. These were curiosity driven researchers who were working on mineral deposits problems on a real place. And so I went to work for Stu after third year. And then they supported me on my master's thesis to give me the time to do some other work. And then they set me up on a PhD thesis. Well, I defined it and set up a potential project and wrote a proposal which was reviewed by the chief geologist of the day. Another frightening experience because I had to peer in front of him. He'd been chief geologist of the 40s and didn't actually talk to students. And then he was CS Lord, Cliff Lord. But he harrowed his way through my proposal, talked to my colleague, Stuart Oskal, and said, we haven't had anybody in Thunder Bay since T.L. Tatton in 1932, but he approved it and I got my fully funded PhD thesis done through the Geological Survey. And then it was a study of the mineral deposits of the protozoic rocks of the North Shore of Lake Superior. And that became my lifelong hobby also as a result of course because it was a fascinating topic. And I had all these wonderful individuals at the Geological Survey giving me advice as well as my PhD student advisor of course at Western. And I went to Western for my PhD. And what would you say was your first official job throughout that career? Well, what happened was that when I was finishing up my PhD I thought gosh, I got to get a job. I got married the year before I finished. My wife already had a PhD and I was doing her second post-doctorate fellowship at Western. I thought I'd go into industry. So I lined up and was offered several fascinating jobs with industry, every one of which that we're going to send you to an office some place or other to catch your teeth and learn about it. But then we want you to go back to our head office in Toronto and become a manager. And I thought I didn't do a PhD to become a manager. I did a PhD to do science. And on the spur of the moment I knew that Lincoln University was looking for an economic geology professor. I phoned up the chairman who I'd met when I was doing my research up there. Next day, went for an interview, they offered me the job that day. And so I took the job. My wife and I moved to Thunder Bay. She ended up creating a job for herself in one of the local hospitals and in physiology. And so she became head of the School of Medical Technology, which is now run by the community colleges, but then wasn't and had a joint program, a degree program at the university. So she did that. And I spent my first six years of my career there as a prof. Thoroughly enjoyed it, got into some fascinating research and realized that in a small school with no graduate program, there was a limit to where you were going to go. Meanwhile, I kept in close touch with my friends in the Geological Survey. They created the job of my dreams for me, which was called the regional metallogenist of the Southern Precambrian Shield. So my field area was Shabugugu, to the Saskatchewan-Manitone border with the Northwest Territories. I could do whatever I wanted as long as I did industry projects that resulted in useful information and publications. So I had, it was an enormous opportunity. So I moved back to home. Very open for you to do. Very open. And I worked with all these wonderful individuals who are great mentors, many, some of whom are still around, a good number I still would stay in touch with. And of course, my colleagues who were, there were a few other, they were expanding at the time. They hired a few other young guys and we all became kind of a really enthusiastic group of people doing different projects. And mine was to define really good projects that I could get a better understanding of the processes that allowed ore deposits to form, because ore deposits are a unique geological occurrence. There's, when you think about it, they represent, I don't know what the percentage would be, probably 0.001% of the Earth's surface. And so incredibly small and incredible metal enrichments. You know, 10,000 times the background amount of metal, sitting in a deposit many times. You figure a gold deposit today typically runs three or four grams, parts per million, and the background gold is one part per million. So there's a, there's 3,000 times concentration right there to make the average grade for most gold deposits. Zinc, typically the content of a basaltic rock is around 80 or 90 parts per million. And the typical zinc deposit will be 6 or 7%, which would be 60 or 70,000. So you gain, you're looking at a thousand to, you know, up to 10,000 times concentration of metals. What's the process that allows you to do that? What went on to give you that unique set of circumstances that allows you to form an ore deposit? And from that, if you understand those unique circumstances, those become exploration guidelines for say, let's look for those in the field, let's look at all of those characteristics and try to find those characteristics that explain the presence of normally poses as best as you can, and then use those in exploration and continually refine them. So that's what I spent the rest of my life doing. So how many was your team? I didn't have a team. We all worked by ourselves. I have graduate students working for me who did thesis work, but as an initial guy, we were all single individuals. We go in the summer with one or two assistants, and that was it. We had tremendous laboratory support in the geological survey, so we get all the work done, you know, microscope support, everything you need them in terms of support, sometimes winter students to help you out as well. But as researchers, we were pretty much expected to do our own research. That has changed, of course, in more recent times in the last 15, 20 years. It's much more a team approach. When I started there, there was no team approach at all. And so I started back in the survey in 1975, continued to do that work. They redefined the jobs a bit, and so I became more specialized in one or two already positive types, again, largely with the Precane Ridge Shield, but a little bit more focused on specific types of mineralization that are in the shield, as opposed to the more general picture. But again, trying to look at the more extensive geological features. If you take an already positive that, let's say the ore body is 500 meters long and 200 meters wide, then it's footprint, the way in which that is the process is affecting the rocks, maybe 10 times that. It may even be 100 times that, if you understand what the footprint is. And that was my job, is to try to figure out what that footprint is. And so I could, that was my job. And so you looked at all features, you put together what we call a genetic model, a model that explains the presence of an already positive. We know that those models are always incorrect in many of their attributes, and not as well defined as they need to be. And that's what the research is about. So you're continually bringing all aspects of science to understand component parts of that model. And that's what we do in research. And in exploration, we use that information to say, okay, I see that, well, Franklin over there has defined these five characteristics that really explain the presence of this particular type of base metal deposit. And some of those are district scale, and some of those are not much more than deposit scale. So let's start to look for those and see if we can identify them. And if we can find some of those, then that says the area has higher prospectivity, then we go into more intensive work and eventually bring in geophysical, geochemical studies and do all sorts of things, focus on develop targets and drill up and see what they got. So were your interests or specializations more in geological surveying that had to do with metals? Yes. Okay, so metals are precious metals, yes, entirely. Nothing to do with hydrocarbons. With uranium, yes, because it's considered metal. But beyond that, no, everything was base metals. And my specialty is actually a certain type of deposit called copper, they're called volcanogenic massive sulfide deposits. And they are zinc, lead, copper, silver, gold deposits. All of those elements occur together. The classic examples of those deposits, the largest one you might know of is the King Creek Minotimans. It's the largest of its type pretty much in the world, towards the metal content. The entire Garanda camp started out the way, the Togamy Lake camp, Cyprus, all the mines in Cyprus formed that way. They're all through the various field areas. British Columbia has a large number of them all through BC, Vancouver Island. And so they are a remarkably abundant, although not super-marge, set of already deposits. Spanish Pyrobaton, another example, Bathurst camp in Canada is a type of deposit. The curious thing about them is that they form throughout geological time and they're actively forming now on the ocean floor. Okay. That's the second part of my research career. Yes, which I've heard you've been a lot of work underwater. Yep. Using actually, it says you were one of the first geologists to use deep submersible to study the black smokers. That happened, it started in about 1981, and they were discovered in 1979. So it was a pretty neat thing. You know, you look back on your career and you wonder, how did you ever get into that? A kid from Northern Ontario would never have done anything larger than a Zodiac on Lake Superior. I had no marine geology training whatsoever. Didn't know the front of the boat from the back. It's a different beast. It's a different world. And you know, what it comes down to, and it's an interesting point that affects many, many careers and most of us kind of forget about it, is that it's often the people you work with that can help create the opportunity that unexpectedly allows you to develop a research career that you never dreamed of. And this was exactly the case here, that in 1980, I think it was, the director of the geological survey took about 50 or 60 years away in the middle of winter to some cheap tourist lodge down on the St. Lawrence for three or four days to kind of look forward to where the geological survey should go. My job as a relatively young scientist then, I'd only been there five or so years, was to look at the future directions of mineral deposits research, which with my colleagues, I put together a talk and I gave what I think was a pretty boring talk actually on what we could do. And I finished the talk up and everybody asked some questions and they had a marine branch. I really had to. I don't have the facts. The name was Michael Keen, said, why aren't you all looking at black smokers? And I went sort of, you know, gosh, Mike, I said that would be an enormous amount of fun, but I don't have any idea how to do it. It must be really expensive research. That was my entire knowledge of the field. And Mike laughed, everybody laughed because they thought they couldn't, the picture of some kid from Northern Ontario who wanted to see him was just too much for them. And my boss, the head of the survey, Ray Price, called me up and he said, that idea of Mike Keen, look into it. So he said, get some of your marine guys from West Coast and East Coast, some of your middle guys, sit down and think about it. So we did. And we came up with a modest idea for a program off Canadian West Coast with some people out there who had some ideas that there might be some mineralization there. That was all. I mean, we had no pathometry maps of the West Coast at the time. We had no knowledge of anything about the geology of the undersea out there. Other than that, roughly speaking, there was an expansion of the wind specific rise system had through many little jogs ended up as the one of the reef system, about within Canadian waters worked part with about 300 kilometres offshore. And that's all we knew. And so we put together a very modest program to go and search for this and got lucky. And got lucky in a sense of getting some unexpected sources of funding that we never dreamed of, we would get and unexpected sources of help from a large number of international or national organizations in other countries, particularly the U.S. and France. And that's how I got my career started. In order to get an understanding of how this worked, because I have really no idea, I had been invited to go to a meeting at the Carnegie or not at the Explorer's Club in Washington with a bunch of people to talk about marine minerals. And I didn't have any idea but I was the only guy they had at the survey and I was just starting the program so I went. And I met a bunch of people who seemed to know what they were doing and one of them was a chap who had worked in the U.S. Navy and was then at Woods Hole and was an incredible enthusiast for technology development on the ocean floor. The name was Bob Ballard. And Ballard, found the Titanic eventually, was incredibly helpful to me and I actually contracted it. I'm not going to give you a license for several days and some talks to my colleagues on the geopolitics of marine minerals and marine science. And he was spot on in what he told me and gave me some really good guidance for how to develop a career. Meanwhile, I've written up this really, really rudimentary program that we were going to try because we didn't have much money. We had ships because the fisheries and oceans supplied research vessels so we could get time on them. We had a solid technical group in each of our marine offices who would give me some support with the equipment and the rest of it I could borrow. But the USGS found out that we were doing this and contacted us and said we'd like to do a cooperative with the Canadian group. I immediately agreed to that, of course, and my first opportunity to see was with the US Geological Survey. I went to Seahawk, the west coast of Newport, Oregon with a man from Astoria, Oregon on the other end. I went off to learn and I worked with a chap there who was just an enormous teacher of marine geology for me and so he taught me the ropes. And after a couple of years of doing that, I developed my own program. Meanwhile, the second thing that happened in that program was that the Assistant Deputy Minister called me and one day said, I'd like you to go to Washington. There's a meeting being out at the Carnegie Geophysical Institute on discussing offshore boundaries, the protocols for defining them. I said, I don't know anything about that. He said, now that we that's why we're sending it. They sent me in with a lawyer that hired from New York and I went to this meeting. Room about this size, 25 people around it. I'm the only Canadian. Ronald Reagan had just got elected. I had no idea what this was about. We opened the meeting, in came this Under Secretary from Interior who looked down at me, said, you and your tin pot country can go to hell. We the United States will define the offshore boundaries. I was yelling in those days, I was going to get up, lawyers said, can't do that. So I said, this is unacceptable to the people of Canada. I didn't know what to do and coffee break came and now I'm the loneliest guy in the room. Nobody's talking to the Canadian guy. I'm over there drinking my coffee and a chap came over to speak, a very dapper, well-dressed chap, introduced himself to me and he was head of the Carnegie Geophysical Institute. His name was Tapp Yoder. This was the guy who had written the books that I had studied. This was the man that as a young student, he had redefined the basis of what we call igneous metrology, which is all of the maybe wrong, the igneous rocks in the world. So here was the guy talking to the boy. I was a little bit worried that he was going to ask me something out of his papers that I'd read. He said, Dr. Primand, this is unacceptable, the treatment you got here. I said, I thought it was a bit rough, sorry. He said, well, I'm going to, I said, I'm seeing the president next week. I'm going to bring this up. And I said, oh, that'd be nice, sir. President of what? He said, I'm seeing the president of the United States. Well, I said, that'd be nice, sir. I went home and I wrote my report. Never in the annals of government history has a report traveled so quickly through government. I went to my boss and went all the way up the chain. And within three days, I was in front of the minister, along with all the bosses. I was now the boy at the back of the row here, but she had read my report and said, this is not good. We've got to design a science program. Long story short, got $6 million a year for three years for my program. That made us the biggest player in the business from nothing. So now all my friends in the U.S. were envious. I talked them into running up some special technology that they had that we did not have, still don't encounter, called swath bathymetry. We mapped our offshore rich system, both with scanning sonar to get the detailed bathymetry and something that makes it look like airfoil is the ocean floor. And developed that entire data set for nothing. The U.S. government did it for nothing and gave us all the data and we published it. Which caused a little angst in the U.S. I did have a call from someone in the White House about it. You did their coast as well. No, they did theirs themselves. They couldn't publish theirs, we published ours. There was a concern about security. And I got a chat from the White House called me up. His name was Admiral Poindexter. He was involved in the Iran Consulate's scandal, eventually. And asked me not to publish it. I gave him a line of BS and said, you got to talk to the boss. I said, you work for the secretary of defense. I said, tell him to call the minister of defense in Canada and he'll talk to his colleague over in our canon. They'll tell me not to do it. They won't do it, sir. But I was working. But anyway, we published the maps and they were an enormous advantage to us. And we had this wonderful data set. We went out and we found several of these, what we call hydrothermal systems operating. And one of them, which one of my colleagues had documented as part of his PhD in the geophysical study he had done out there, one of them turned out to have a giant deposit, which we drilled with the ocean So the program lasted 10 years. I started out doing deep submergence diving on a number of these systems with my U.S. colleagues. And the French got onto this and I went out with it from there as well. Did some work on the glottis. And then eventually we isolated one system that we really felt was worthy of extensive research called Middle Valley. And it had some unique geological characteristics that made it a relatively easier place to work. And we had no idea how large the deposit was that we found there. We found occurrences. We found active forming systems. We went over with the ocean drilling program after we managed to sell the program to them and drilled it. And it turned out to be quite a large deposit. And it's still sitting there, of course, because it's underneath the sediments. But it was a wonderful natural laboratory. All of that work, not just the work that we did, although it was a major program, but although the other work that was going on in the world, really advanced our knowledge of the process of the systems that make these deposits because now we can study them in real time. So amongst other things, I drilled a 1000 meter hole underneath this system. And that got me into rocks that were at well over 300 degrees C. And that was what we call the reaction zone, where the metals were coming out of the rocks and going into solution. Nobody has ever done that since. And that proved the concept of one part of this model I talked about, about how these deposits work. So we learned a lot about how all of this worked. And collected some amazing samples, got a lot of really cool research done. And that went on up until the early 90s, when there were a lot of changes in the government of Canada and redirections. And we had come to kind of a plateau in that kind of research. And my career had changed again at that stage. And so I moved out of research for the rest of my career at the GSC, starting around 91 or so, and became chief geologist. And that was a different set of challenges. But nevertheless, it was an amazing opportunity, one which in my wildest dreams I would never have dreamed of doing. It was the defining moment in my career, but at the same time, I was still operating on land and with the projects and taking some of that new knowledge. And I still do this. I mean, we've learned some, we've learned things out of that work that we still haven't published, and which we can go back and re-examine the samples and learn more from. And so because the samples were all very carefully archived. And so it was an enormously good project. And has your work been or become fruitful for natural resources, natural resource industries? Oh, yes, because we validated the concepts. We validated the model. We said, this is real. When I can see it in real time, when I can explain to you why this one is gold rich and that one's not. Then that's, you know, and when I know exactly why that is, then that constrains your geological work to say, we only want to work if we're looking for gold rich deposits of that type, we only want to work in that kind of terrain. And that particular one, the gold thing, is as simple as the depth of water. They only form in relatively shallow water, the water in these systems has to boil. And the chemistry that underpins that is quite advanced thermodynamic based chemistry. That you have to know, that's part of what we do. And so there's, you know, all of the chemical parameters that are basically physical chemistry that underpin this were known. But suddenly we had a real time, real life system operating there that we could win with the submarine and sample that actual water that makes the deposits before it cools off. And we proved the concept. And then it's a little bit of not very tricky chemistry actually that everybody would have said, well, yeah, that's right. But this actually works. And so now the trick of course is how do you know what the water depth is in a bunch of 2.7 billion year old rocks that we would have in the for Cambridge Hill. That's a little harder thing. Yeah, I know, kidding. Yeah. But, but, you know, it sets the stage we now know other things about certain characteristics of these rocks that are only attended on relatively shallow water features. And so we start to look for those in our geological mapping. And so there are indirect ways of getting at this. It's one of the great unknowns in terms of specifically calibrating water depth. We aren't very good at that yet. But we have methods that are coming along that help us with that. And that's just one of the many, many features. That hot water as it comes out obviously does add things to all of the rocks through which it's passing. And those bad things provide very good guidelines also. That's another thing we work. And we calibrate them, see them in real time, know what their relationships are. So it was a great, great experience. It's still going on today. I had a colleague at University of Toronto, Steve Scott, who did a lot of the work and Steve deserves a lot of credit for having been a constant driver in on the academic side for this. And one of his graduate students who I snapped up and hired right away, Mark Hannigan, who's a prophet all over you now, but work with us in the geological survey continues on. And Mark, as we speak, is at sea. And so there's a lot of that work carrying on today. And I still stay involved a little bit vicariously. And I haven't been to sea since 98. That was my line. I retired in 98. That was my last shot. The boys took me back to sea off New Guinea for a very interesting thing. But I'm staying involved in one little piece of technology that we developed uniquely in Canada, back in the late 80s, that had never been done before. I stayed on its board up until March. I just retired. And that's a full ocean depth, remotely operated via them. It had never been done. The oil industry did it, but they dropped it straight down from the oil platforms. We wanted to develop one that you can drive around on the ocean floor. It had to be tethered initially. But we wanted to be able to collect samples, take movies, collect water samples, hard samples, mud samples, whatever we wanted, and be able to do this for extensive periods of time and know exactly where the vehicle is and be able to get it back up and get the samples back up. A group in Vancouver who built these sumps for the oil business said they would like to give it a try. There was a government program called the Unsolicited Proposal Program. It wasn't too unsolicited, I must say. We kind of got them to propose the idea. The Department of Supply and Service put up a large amount of money together within our can in fisheries and oceans. We built the very first underwater deep submergence vehicle with five kilometers possible water depth. We put it on one of the very first ever fiber-optic systems for its tether. Nobody had ever tried that before. Paid a million bucks for that five kilometer fiber-optic cable, first on. Got up to work and I was the first guy who ever took it to sea and got it to the bottom of the ocean. And Danny lost it the first day. And that was in 889? That was probably 88 or 89. But before we drilled, we drilled a middle valley in 91, so it would have been 88, 89, and we got it down there. That vehicle has undergone many, many revision changes, upgrades, and still operates today. Government didn't want to run it anymore, so a group of us bought it for a buck and put it into an off-profit corporation. We run it as the Canadian Scientific Subversive Facility out of Victoria. And we have an excellent team of engineers who run it. We're the guys who recovered the data box from the peanut and the north ferry when it sank. We also got the hard drive out of the computer. We went through the bridge window, got them out. That was pretty cool. We developed for that. Extended the arm, broke the window, went in and did the bolts, and it's all done remotely with a tactile hand. So it's really cool technology. If you're ever out there, you ought to go and have a look. So yeah, so we did that, and that continues today. It's mainly for research purposes. A lot of biology stuff. Of course, now we've put a powered fiber optic network out in the ocean. I was on the board for that. We developed a project called Neptune that collects real-time data on the ocean for now. University of Victoria operates that as a facility for Canada. And we were the first people in the world to do that as well. And so I was pretty, pretty cool. So I think a whole lot of fun. And throughout your long-buried career, what would have been your hardest task or biggest challenge or project? Scientific or otherwise? Both. Scientific, I would say in some respects, the hardest challenge was to really put together that marine program. Because we had no... Yeah, the guy had to borrow a camera system from Lomont Doherty. We didn't have one in Canada. Fortunately, I knew a prof down there, and he came up with a system and his great students and ran it for us. I bought the thing from him. Still sits out there in Victoria. Building the equipment we needed to be able to do that sampling. It had never been done. A lot of that. We had, we realized that we had to be able to protect the samples. The minute we got them on board, so we had to build, for example, an electric atmosphere glove box to seal them up, to save them from getting oxidized. We had to learn how to do the analytical work on these things, because we really didn't know how. We had to develop specialized methods for all of that. We were right at the front end. Nobody done any of this before. Everything that had been done up to that point, because we started, and I remember in the early 80s with this, and developed this whole program. And the work before that was just kind of glorified prospecting. We found another one, but nobody did much with it. So we had to develop the water samples. We had to develop all of them. Borrow or get technology from people like NOAA. Very helpful. NOAA guys really helped us enormously, with some time, with all sorts of things, with technology, with loaning the equipment and allowing us to build our own. And so, you know, it was a truly quite amount of effort between NOAA, the USGS, ourselves, Inframerre in France, and the universities, of course. And so it was, it was great. But that was scientifically probably the hardest thing to do in many respects. And also it was one of the very first team efforts, because it wasn't me. I was the head of this project, but my colleagues were the meat potatoes of it. They were the hard workers of the guys that were out there actually doing this. And I had a good, solid, excellent team of people, both from the Geological Survey and through the universities that they're working with me. So that's what really made it. And they were enormously enthusiastic bunch of people. So that, that was scientifically probably the more, the most difficult thing. You know, a lot of fun. Interesting as heck, but not, but not trivial. You know, I had to get the machine shop at the Geological Survey to build me a staff, and I had no clue what I was doing. I had tremendous support from really good engineers and elsewhere, so that was how. So from a science point of view, that was the hardest thing I ever did. The hardest thing I had to do politically, or not politically, but managerially, was lay off one third of the staff of the Geological Survey of Canada, and that was completely undoing. And that was due to the Martin downsizing. As you know, Paul Martin and the government of Canada decided that we were spending too much money. They were quite correct with that. And so rather than nickel and dime away, Martin said, we're going to review every program in the government, and we're going to downsize by anywhere from 50% on down. And I was taken out of the Geological Survey and put in charge of figuring out a downsize science in Natural Resources Canada. That caused me to have to learn about forestry, about mining technology, about geography, about the whole map making, all of those components, and figure out how to value the program. And that was not easy. It was challenging. There was no question. It was brutal to have to do it. And I answered directly to the Deputy Minister and the Minister of the time, but it had to be done. And you know, I had lots of my colleagues saying, you know, why are you beating up on us? Well, I wasn't beating up on us. I was trying to figure out how to do this in a way that would least affect the value of the organization to Canadians, which is the key thing. If you're going to have a government organization that has to have value to Canadians, and so that's how we evaluated the program, which components had the greatest value to Canadians, which components could be done somewhere else, which components could be done in the private sector. So we reviewed every part of our agency as every other government agency did. And so, you know, in the Geological Survey alone, there were eight components in CANMET. There were eight components in forestry. There were eight components, each one specific target component that defined the whole organization. And then we evaluated it against five or six criteria that the government set. And then we inter-evaluated all of those and put them into rank order. And my job was to figure out how I had to go. And you know, what had to go was not just program, but it was people. Fortunately, the government managed it in such a way that they came in with a wonderful downsizing program for senior people. So if you had more than 25 years experience in and you were under 55, you could go out with respectively no-renews pension. Guess who took the deal on the third last day. I had, I was, no, you had to be over 55, that's right. I was one month over 55 and three days short of 30 years, which is the other rule. You can't be over 30 years. I retired in 1998. I had 30 years in. And I thought, what the heck, I'm young enough to do something else. And I burned out from doing this program. I mean, it was not pleasant. I had a lot. But you know, we affected most of the downsizing by retirements. And so it wasn't personally as difficult as it might have been. And the government was very fair to all of us and said, if you want to come back and continue your science, keep your office. We'll keep the budget a little bit, you know, do the best we can for you. Just, you know, being paid by pensions Canada or whatever they're called, you know, your pensions paying you or not. And fair enough, a lot of guys took that option. Some, I had breakfast with one of the guys today. He still goes back. And then he's 74 and he's back and helping curate the samples. So, you know, it was humane in a sense. It would have to be done. And at the end of the day, although I don't think we did as good a job as we might have, you always look back and know it could have been better, but we did the best we could. And that was most unpleasant. So in 1998, I found myself, you know, done in a sense. Well, I'll give this consulting gig a little try. I'm doing a little university stuff. The consulting gig worked out to something rather well. And that sounds Yeah. And what do you, it's a recurring theme with the people I interviewed is, although some are at a typical age of where they should be retired or not do any work, they continue working consulting. Yes. What's your consulting? What what My consultant, exactly what I did at the geological survey on that, but on the opposite side of the table, I now use and develop those criteria to help find where deposits. Okay. And it's as simple as that. What I offer, and a group of us offer that somewhat unique is we bridge that gap between the academic and the applied. And so the guys in universities who are doing curiosity driven research by definition, that's where it should be done. A lot of it is targeted, but that's their job. They go out and they pursue knowledge. And they do a very good job at that. My colleagues in the geological survey are perhaps a little more applied by looking at things at a bigger scale and generating a lot of data. My job now is to be the link between that enormous knowledge generating capacity we have in Canada, universities and government, and the industry side, which can't afford to generate that knowledge. And many respects, particularly the junior one industry, can't even afford to have people reading the literature. So my job is to bring the best ideas I can to that, design how to test those out, maybe execute some of those tests, help them with what they need help with. Small companies sometimes it's as simple as getting their optics right. Big companies, it's very complex problems that are beyond the capacity of what they can do and require, for example, a lot of advanced statistical stuff, a lot of advanced chemistry, a lot of advanced understanding of what controls the chemistry. And so I have to, that's what I do for them. And the objective of course is to design something that works, hopefully it's successful. And if it is, then you say here's what I did, here's how you do it, here's the software you need, here's the knowledge you need to be able to do it, the training you need, see how you can do yourself. What's an example of a fairly big project that you you helped? Well, there's a number of them, but I'll give you the example of one they probably heard of, which is the Ring of Fire. The Cromite Discovery, the Ring of Fire. Now, what happened was that a small company based in Toronto, called Spider Resources, had, was looking for diamonds up in lots of madeleines, had with their partner, which was De Beers, drilled what De Beers called copper and schist, which is about as undefined as you're going to find, turned it over to Spider, who were a small company with some top-notch guys who were diamond specialists, and called me and said, because you look at this drill core, tell us what this is. So I looked at it, I said, yes I know exactly what this is, here's what it is, here's what you can do with this, and here's how these things occur, and maybe here's some ideas for what you can do next. And so they took me seriously, and we did that. And we designed a program, I designed a program for them, to look for more of these base metal occurrences, which are these copper zinc things I was telling you about, these natural sulfide deposits. We found a second one. Now, as you're probably aware, that's madeleines is the world's largest swamp. There is no crop. There are no rocks to be seen anywhere. It's all covered by either paleozoic cover or a gigantic swamp, and so you have to use remote sensing. There's not a whole lot that works, but there are some things that do, and one of them was the magnetic surface. So these guys had magnetic data, these little occurrences that we found had a distinct magnetic signal. The problem with those magnetic signals is they're not unique, they're there, but they can be other things. And so they, we drill a couple of these, we found a third one, they drilled it, and they got one meter of what we call chromite, which is the chrome ore. And in discussing it with them, the guy said, well, you know, what do we do with that? I knew the rock type, and I knew the system there in geologically, and it was the one that can have significant chrome. Geophysically, there's only one method that works for chrome, and it turns out to be gravity, which is not an easy one to use, because when you measure the gravity signal, you're measuring the whole earth's gravity signal, but you're looking for a tiny signal near the surface. But there are ways that geophysicists have them interpreting that data, so we were able to do that. And I said, look, let's run a gravity traverse over this. See if we can pick up the one meter. But make it a long line, because it's swamp, it's easy. And so they did, and they got, they said to bump over the one line, the next big bump right next to it, was a hundred meters in terms of the chrome ore. That became the, what was called, the big daddy discovery. And this thing was incredibly well behaved geologically. The guys who had the property next door picked it up as well. And we found a world class, very high-grade chrome deposit. Both of us, my company, Spider Resources, and Three Westalons, next door, who I also, let's get something for, under a joint arrangement with everybody, got bought out by Cliffs. And that was... You probably made a fortune. Yeah, I did well, right? Yeah, I did well, yeah. And then, Spider, Spider, we all did, we all went away with big smiles. Yeah, for sure. You know, I got to say that was 2010, and that was, that was a good deal. But, and, you know, I've had a couple of others of those, one early in my career, found, helped find a one for Miranda, that happened to my mortgage forever, and that was a nice deal. And you know what happened? It was, again, it was the application of basic science principles and the thing that I had learned in studying their deposit. And that was, that was kind of, kind of satisfying, you know? I learned a little chemical trick that we could explain the presence of the deposits, and I targeted some drilling for them in an area that was completely unknown, simply to get some geological information. They were not keen to do that, because my targeting was based on one Oak Rump, a long ways away, with one sample, that showed an anomalous condition in a related element, not even the base metals. We drilled it, and I first hole found mine, and I was lucky. Completely lucky. But that helped. I was still living in Thunder Bay, then I was still teaching MSDs. That all worked out, and I've had a couple others like that. And you know, there's no success that you could say is attributed to an individual in this business. It's all teamwork. And it was the same with the chrome mine business. I mean, I, I made my comments. I, I have to support the company. The company had good geologists who knew what to do, and how to handle rocks. And so then I was actually able to bring in a better expert than myself to help them develop that particular site. And then eventually, another company that was also somewhat related to us, found a major nickel deposit there in Noron. The company was in there pushing hard to develop that. So it's a fascinating place. And it's a fascinating place because it has a mineral resource inventory that's been developed for 10 years. That is remarkable. And what it all says is that this is a new, probably really major mining district for Canada. It's just, unfortunately, in a world's largest swamp, and 300 kilometers from the infrastructure. So it's going to take some time to get all of the issues sorted out with building the infrastructure, dealing with the First Nations issues there, which are quite important, and have to be dealt with. And so it'll take some time. But, you know, it will eventually happen. We've done it in a more difficult spot. We have, I know. Well, I went to Tech Cominko's whole mine up on Little Corvallis Island, and you can't get more removed than Little Corvallis Island. And they were certainly making money, money, that thing. It was remarkable what they were doing. You know, I've worked on a number of already projects that, one of which was a mine, and others in which are not getting close, that are in very remote areas. I think we go run the Meadowbank Mine, a some 100 kilometers north of the Baker Lake, and they don't grow up, and there they go, they're running it. They just found a new major discovery just now. So, you know, it will happen, and it takes time, it takes big discoveries, and it takes support from other ones, and won't go people to do this, but it's important. And that's the fun I have is helping these guys. You know, I do some work for all of those companies, and I give them ideas, some of which work, some of which don't, and try to bring them the right expertise, because it's a broad field, and they need good geophysicists, sometimes different types of genealogy, that sort of thing. So, yeah. So, yeah, I've had some interesting successes. What would you consider, well, this is often a tough question, so I'll split it into two, kind of like we did a while ago, the signs of it getting the managerial. But what are you proud of stuff in life? And we could say career-wise? Well, career-wise, I guess it's the contributions I make. There's one other thing that I was involved in doing that I've been quite proud of, and you may be aware of it. Back in just about the time I was retiring and just after, a group of us got together here in Ottawa to form something called the Partnership Group for Science and Engineering. And I was representing Canada's geoscientists on it, because I was a past president of the Geological Association of Canada, and the meeting was being held over at Ottawa U, and the Vice-Rector of Research there, Howard Albert, was chairing it. And we decided that we needed a collectivity to effectively lobby government on behalf of the science societies of Canada, Canadian Federation of Biologists, etc., etc., and we were all members of this thing, to lobby for better funding for research in Canada. So we had a single objective, and that's what it was. I was asked, for reasons I'll never understand, to try to figure out how we could communicate science better with members of Parliament. So I got a bunch of local ampese that I didn't really know very well, together for lunch or coffee or something one day, and said, here's my challenge, guys. Have you got any ideas? And their response was interesting, and they said, you know you science guys, you talk a funny language, you put one over us on us with that funny language. And I said, you know, if that's what you think we do, then our work is cut out for us, because we don't do that intentionally. But yes, we do that. I know that, because I've experienced it on the other side of the camera on occasion, when I've done interviews and people say, you know, get off the technical jargon, Frank will tell us what the hell this is. So I decided to set something up called Bacon and Egg Hits. One of my committee members made that suggestion. He's a guy from agriculture, unfortunately I can't remember his name. And he said, you know, number one, we're going to call on that because we've got to laugh at ourselves. And Bacon and Egg Hits, you smiled, everybody does when I say that. And we decided what we would do is we would put on a science talk on Parliament Hill once a month, and we would do it as a breakfast meeting, and we did it on a Thursday morning, which is committee day on the Hill. We knew that people didn't have to go to the committee until nine, so we put a 7.30 breakfast on talk at eight, half hour, carefully scripted talk, no technical terms. What's the value of what your science is to Canada? What's the excitement of what you've found? I can tell you we have no shortage of people wanting to get to the talks. We vetted it and still do. I'm not doing it. I did it for four or five years and then I turned it over to other people. I'm still going today. And we, NSERC was incredibly supportive. They actually provided us with one of their public relations guides to vet the talks, to help us to make sure they were not too technical, to keep them to that half hour, and to make them funny. And we're a little deprecating, self-deprecating at times, because we guys tend to, you know, guys with PhDs have room filling egos. That's part of our mantra. And you know, you got to get off it sometimes. And sometimes you do make screw-ups. Sometimes you do learn the hard way, or sometimes you accidentally make a discovery. And all of that's fair. But the important thing is that science needs support. So we started the Bacon and Agents talks. And I was the first chairman. And I started out getting 35 people, now they get 150. And is it all the members of Parliament? No, it's open to the public. It's open to everybody. Members of Parliament, senators and members of Parliament, get a free breakfast, as do members of the press. And we had to round some money up to pay for that. We did. That took almost no effort back in that time, because there were some very, very large companies that were very keen on supporting science. We would never attribute who they were. Because we did not want to be appearing. So who those companies were? But, and we don't to this day say who they were. They're anonymous donations. They're anonymous donations. But, and they were large. They were 50,000 bucks each. They bought a lot of breakfast. And they've topped it up from time to time. And, and that's what buys the breakfast. And we use the Parliamentary Restaurant to supply them. We did them in the West Block and room 100 up until they renovated, sorry renovated. Now they do it over on the train station. Now here they're going to renovate that. I'm not quite sure where we're going to go next. But Senator Block said it's way to. Yeah, so we make it kicked out. But anyway, it worked out enormously well. And, and I actually gave a talk to the thing about two or three years ago. And, and finance minister, Mr. Flyer, he turned up to my talk and, and then immediately renewed the full through chair deal. So, you know, I'm not that I'm sure of that by talking to them, but my talk was on future directions for research that underpin exploration. Which is what I do. But, but you know, we've had everything. We have robotics. We've done astronaut. I had Mark Garno as a speaker once before he became a politician. You know, we've had people doing telescopes. We had medical. We don't do a lot of medical stuff. Some and some really cool stuff actually. And, and, and the idea is to get the members of parliament enthusiastic about science. I gotta say that that was the easiest cell ever. The members of parliament may not be scientists, but they're pretty brave folks. And they really took to this. And I had one or two of my members of parliament who started to study up before. The one that surprised me the most was Preston Manning. Who would come with the best ever questions? He had really looked up stuff and came. That's so very difficult work, you know. But they all did. I found that it was quite remarkable how engaged members of parliament would get and how they remain engaged and interested. And, and what we always did was to try to get the person's member of parliament, if they were from outside the auto area, which most were, to introduce them. That way we connected the scientists with their member of parliament. And got them interested. Gosh, you know, there's a person in my constituency that's doing this work, you know. So yeah, it was a, you know, it's been a real success and continues to be. And so you're welcome to go. The offices, they have a one-person part-time person that runs it. Donna Bogue, her name is, and she works out of the Royal Society Office. What are they called efficiently? They're called the partnership group for science and engineering. Okay. Email me and I can send you contacts. She'll put you on the mailing list. And then you have to register the night before because of security reasons now, but it's not a big deal. Yeah. And so yeah, it's good fun. That'd be interesting. Yeah. And so yeah, anyway. That is a question. So I saw the fact that I was involved in doing that. Yeah, for sure. You know, that was, that was, I mean, I done lots of other stuff with professional societies and things that have always, you know, always resulted in good things for students for other things. They started a foundation in Canada for the Society of Economic Geologists to support students and, and we supported, you know, almost virtually every graduate student in our field gets support from them now in Canada and because industry puts up the money and we all put up money and half of us have written them in on our wills. And so, you know, organizations like that, but those are always team efforts. You know, I, I was the guy that negotiated the legal framework for the Canadian one because I had a form of bureaucrat and I knew how to never tell you, say, take no from some bureaucrat at CRA and say, here's what we're doing. Tell me how I get there. And that's what you do, you know, and we got the thing going and it's worked out really well. I sat on this board for many, many years. Retired from there. You get worn out after a while and do these. So, you know, you get asked to do lots and lots of these kinds of things as a, as a now kind of older scientist in the business. And if you can get back, fine. And when you're not giving back, you know what's going to happen. They're not going to call you anymore and that's fine too. Well, sometimes it's important also to take some time off. Well, I do. We do. My wife and I do. My wife retired. She was the Assistant Deputy Minister of National Department and, and her last major job was that she started up and then operated, ran, and coordinated the Canada Specialised Agency, which was an algorithmic partnership of three or four government departments. And she did that and got it going and then retired probably 10 or 12 years ago now. She runs a little company, at least in Washington, called Lifeline and it does human health relief and toxicology studies and that's really cool what they're doing and that's one other thing. You know, you got to keep engaged. We have one daughter and she's off doing her thing at USC. California. Yeah. There you go. Last question for you. Sure. One of my favorites. If you were to talk to someone much younger and as, like myself, for students, what would be your one piece of, what piece of advice or the most important life lesson you could give? Oh, that's easy. Simply do what you are most interested in. If you can't figure that out, then invest some time, and that may be an extra year or two of universities, both you and I have done and many people have done, invest some extra time to search out what that might be. My daughter started out of music at McGill, ended up in chemistry and math, finally got a PhD in statistics from Harvard. Okay. Now that's a big shift. Okay. She had no clue what she wanted to do. She loved playing the trumpet. She was a classical trumpet player. She would have loved a career of that. You know how many jobs there are in North America a year for a classical trumpet player? You know, if you're not with Marsalis, you're not getting the job. You know, she realized that early on and said, this is fine, but this isn't really my passion either. And math turned out to be your passion. So it goes, you know, and I tell that to everybody because if you're not enjoying life, look for something else, if you can afford to look for something else. But if and so that's the thing. I fell into geology and I fell into geology because I like the outdoors. Other people, you know, one of the things that bothers me quite a lot is that people aren't curious enough about the earth. And I fault the fact that we don't teach earth science at an early enough stage in school and that the people who do teach it may not have the background to excite the students. You know, I talked first-year geology when I started teaching. And on the very first day of my class, I gave them an exam. I said, if you get 100 on the exam, you're done. You got any in the course, you're not taken. And I was teaching in Thunder Bay. And so I said, when was the last magnitude, six and a half or seven earthquake in the Thunder Bay area? That was the first question. When was the last major volcanic eruption in the Thunder Bay area? And what's underneath the Camelistic River that runs right through the town? What was it the questions I asked? You never saw 120 more frantic students in your life trying to figure out what the answer and whip them through the textbook, which of course didn't have the answer to any of those. And then I said, okay, anybody get any answers? And nobody did, of course ever. But then I said, let me tell you the answers. And let me tell you about what happened a billion years ago, just out in front of Thunder Bay here, when the whole of Lake Superior ripped apart into a gigantic inter-critonic rift and dumped out incredible volumes of volcanic rock and nothing has happened to them since. And there they said, you go out on those rocks in the islands of Lake Superior, they look like Hawaii. Nothing has ever changed. You look at the rocks that sit under them. They have the earliest best-preferred preserved life forms in the world and they've done for information. 1.8 billion years old. You make a microscope slide of those you can still see the cell structures. And if you're lucky, you'll catch them microtically spinning. So, 1.8 billion years old. How many people knew that in my class? How many people know that at all? How many people in Thunder Bay know that? And so, see, we need to excite people about this, about things like this. And you can't do it with a set of boring lectures and you can't do it necessarily in the first year, of course. And now with television, we do a lot better. There are lots of great programs that get into that a bit more. Unfortunately, I think people watch some old guys like me. But, you know, maybe that's unfair. But I think we need to do better at that. And it starts in... I want that for sure. I used to watch this to be addicted to Discovery Channel and documentaries about animals and space at a very young age. Exactly. And I think that's important. But I think it's important to have it structured into the educate. You know, what's the earth made of? You know, I remember one of my little interesting deviations was back in the late 70s, just after, actually, it was in the early 80s, after the moonshots, the very first ones. I was asked to go to NASA in Houston and spend some time trying to figure out what's next for NASA. And we came up with a mission to planet Earth or something in the shuttle. That was a lot of fun. But it was... I asked why didn't you invite me to come to this meeting? And they said, well, you gave us a field trip one time up in Northwest Military to look at one of these base metal deposits. And you explained that 2.7 billion years ago there were gigantic 400 degree hot springs spewing out metals under the bottom of the ocean for. We didn't know that. And so when I went down, the very first thing I did was they had a group of 100 of us and they hid away in the hills of Virginia for a whole week. We had to contemplate many things. And the first thing they broke us into the work groups and the first thing I had to do with a group of five of us was to estimate the potential for discovery of resources on Io, which is one of the ones that you better. Think about that. You figure what's the fundamental thing that a planet has to have in order for it to have resources. What's the number one thing? It has to be a differentiated planet. It has to have a core, a metal, and a crust. How many planets have that? Well, when that's the guy seemed to know something about that. And there are ways of figuring that out. One of them is the volcanic area. So it goes. And so that's at the biggest scale, the number one question you would ask. Somebody said, I want you to go to the planetary system and find another resource rich earth. Well, that's the first criteria. Take them off. And so that's getting people curious about the science. And that's the ridiculous thing. And we've, you know, not all scientists are good at it. And that's not, that's not, that's not a failing at all. It is important though that those who can communicate well and people like Ballard and others who have done a good job at that, you know, the quarks and quarks guy and Bob and Donald who does that now. And his predecessor, I've done the quarks and quarks a couple of times back in the day. And these guys are really good at getting the curiosity part of science out there and the latest discoveries. And that's a critical thing. And I think, you know, we need to somehow get that into the school level. So it isn't a choice. It's kind of an exposure. You know, I didn't have a choice to read Shakespeare, you know, and I probably wouldn't have taken it, you know, although I look back on it and say that originally, but on the other hand, learning about the earth by somebody who's enthusiastic and explaining well is important. So I'll let him be a teacher. Yeah. And, you know, going to the field. I mean, I'll tell you, teaching at Thunder Bay, you couldn't pick a better place to go to the field. It had every geological process you wanted within a half day. So, you know, that's good part of teaching and training and getting people excited. Well, anyway, thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. Okay, you bet. Yeah, shit. Here we are, four o'clock.