Zehra Karakilic
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi, I am Zehra, a graduate in Cognitive Neuroscience at Radboud University in the Netherlands. I will be your host today.

In our new series, we are presenting highlights from short conversations with professionals about what constitutes as beautiful in their line of work. The examples and experiences they share are not only inspiring, but also informative about the interesting projects they work on. So, join us in exploring reflections on beauty – spanning from science and engineering to other fields.

In this episode, our guest is Brandon Dugan, a professor of geosciences at the Colorado Mines University in Denver.  

We heard Dr. Dugan speak on our podcast episode 127 a few months ago when he shared information about his research about freshwater resources discovered under the Atlantic seabed. He returns to share his thoughts on what constitutes as beautiful in his line of work.

As a geoscientist who explores unconventional approaches to solving problems, we start our episode with one the experiences he shares around a peculiar problem that the drilling companies were facing in shallow water.  Let’s get started.

Brandon Dugan
I definitely have used the word beautiful to describe some of the things that I talk about because I study natural systems. I guess there’s just sort of an inherent beauty in nature, but I also love math. And there’s sort of a beauty in equations and trying to explain how things work. And that’s really the linkage for me is sort of this natural beauty and this elegance of being able to explain it with simple mathematics. Those linkages to me, are really amazing and insightful of like trying to understand how something works.

In the mid 1990s, there were some drilling issues where drilling companies were having. They were losing instrumentation very shallow in the seafloor, like 1000 feet of water, and then down 200 feet below the seafloor, they were losing instrument they were seeing quicksand like conditions, and they didn’t know what was happening.

Many major oil companies and drilling companies were plagued by this problem, because it was costing them money and resources and trying to figure out how to access deeper targets that they wanted to. So, they had empirical observations of the problem and the impact that this had on safety and our ability to get resources. And I, with some colleagues of mine, were able to do two things that sort of, in my mind, were beautiful extensions of the project. We were able to extend a physics-based understandings. We were able to write equations to understand why this system behaved the way that it did.

They were creating these small landslides in the ocean and people before didn’t understand how it could have happened. They didn’t understand how they could have gotten the criteria available for failure this shallow. We knew it existed deeper. So, if we went down 5000 feet or 6000 feet, we knew that we had these very high pressures that could lubricate a surface and create a landslide. But then it’s too deep dept to be a landslide. So, with some very simple equations, and thinking about the problem in two dimensions, and three dimensions, we were able to come up with a theoretical explanation for how we got these systems to fail, create landslides. And probably the most beautiful part was that in 2005, we got to go out with new instruments that we helped design and test our physics-based hypothesis with the natural observations, and we were pretty close to correct. And so that was really amazing, because we were able to take apart this natural phenomenon that was causing chaos in the working world, and explain it with pencil and paper, and then merge the two through, you know, million-dollar technology to go out and take samples of the ocean seafloor. So, it was mathematics, coupled with human applications, coupled with direct field evidence, that made us understand how this whole system worked. And now it’s been expanded to other basins around the world and even thinking about how some things like canyons formed on planets like Mars.

Zehra
So, where does Dr. Dugan see the beauty in geosciences?

Brandon
I think, for me, the natural system, the Earth system, rivers, streams, forests, mountains are all beautiful to me sort of from a sort of traditional naturalist standpoint. And in my field, where I see the beauty of being a geoscientist is trying to be able to explain the processes that we observe in nature, to break them down to their simplest pieces and understand sort of at the fundamental level, how are these things behaving. And so really, that’s the elegance and the excitement for me is trying to explain in the most simple terms, how something works, because then we can make it more complicated and still understand it but we have to understand the simple part first. So, for me, the beauty is really explaining things at the ground level of how they work and function, and the interactions between different things. So, I really look at the interaction between sediments and water, and how that creates things like landslides or water resources, or water for plants. And so how do they interact? And so, I go to the most fundamental level; how do water and rocks interact? And then, how can other things use them?

Zehra
Dr. Dugan has been working in this field both as a researcher and a professor for over 20 years. We wondered if his criteria for beauty evolved over time with the different roles he has taken on.

Brandon
In terms of how my viewpoint has evolved, and how I work with students, they’re still a little bit different. For me, when I was a student, I started my PhD research 27 years ago, I appreciated the beauty of the natural system, but I didn’t really understand the beauty of trying to understand that at its simplest level. I was still used to sort of my undergraduate training and my high school training of always trying to get the answer to something. So, I was always looking for the answer to a problem rather than the understanding of a problem. So, it was a little bit different. The approach that I thought about it, the approach that I do things is different. So now I think about how to understand it. I develop a hypothesis and a test, and I come up with an answer, whether it be correct or incorrect, then I adapt. And so now I’m much more focused on sort of the adaptations that I have to make because that’s part of the understanding for me. Twenty-five years ago, I was more focused on getting an answer and thinking that that would be the end of the process. Now, what I’ve sort of learned is, as I learn small bits and pieces, I do understand something, but I also get to ask other questions, which is more exciting. And so that’s sort of my personal evolution of how I think about things and, and the interplay between things. Now I’m more interested in the new questions I’m going to ask than just getting the answer to the original one. And nine times out of ten, I end up learning something about an item that I didn’t know I was going to discover.

With the students, for me, it’s really trying to have them understand that being wrong is okay. That’s where I find beauty is when they crossed that threshold to, I don’t just need to get the right answer, I need to understand how this works.

And so, I really work with students to try to understand that, trying and doing and succeeding and failing are all valuable. It’s not just about getting the right grade, or the right GPA or something like that. It’s about continually learning and taking what I learned to the next level from each step to step. So, trying to think about how everything builds upon itself.

For me, to go back to the how do I see beauty in this, the beauty in the relationship is when it really clicks with the students. When I see the students stop worrying about getting the right answer and focusing on, I want to learn more. That’s the winning part for me. That’s what keeps me in teaching.

Zehra
Is Dr. Dugan’s appreciation for nature primarily what got him into this field?

Brandon
It was something that I only realized later in my life, I mean, probably part of the way through my PhD. So, after I finished my undergraduate degree, and I was a handful of years into my PhD studies, I realized that I was naturally drawn towards natural systems. So, I started out in a STEM field, I started out but just in mathematics, doing an undergraduate degree in mathematics, and I appreciated mathematics, and I enjoyed it, and I liked applying it to things. But I wasn’t invigorated or stimulated in the beginning just to do math for the sake of doing math. And so, I was trying to find something where I could apply math to a problem that I wanted. And you know, you could be an actuary or an accountant or something like that. And those seemed not too exciting to me. So, I didn’t pursue them. And I just kept looking for the thing. And it was finally when I found Geosciences and that I could apply math to that. But that’s where I ended up. But when I did that, when I was an undergraduate, I had no conscious understanding that that was driven by my upbringing and spending time in nature. Later in my life, I realized that it was this appreciation for nature that sort of drew me and my math background there.

Zehra
Dr. Dugan’s current research is about freshwater resource found under the ocean.

Brandon
Probably the primary project I’m working on right now is trying to understand again, this system that doesn’t make sense at first observation is how this water exists deep, deep beneath the ocean sediments, so you’d expect it to be saltwater, and it’s freshwater.

I’m spending a lot of time right now trying to organize a project for next summer to go out and actually sample some of these waters, so we can have mathematically driven hypotheses about how old the water is, what its composition is. The next year, we want to go out and sample it south of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, to try and see how well our understanding of the system is. So, we can make forecasts about how it’ll change over time due to changes in precipitation with climate change, changes in sea level due to climate change. So how is this potential resource going to change over time? And how might it be accessible to people? Right now, we’re in a lot of technical planning stages. We know what we want to do and what we want to measure, so we’re assembling a science party of about 30 scientists who will participate. All geoscientist but some of them studied water chemistry, some of them have studied rock physics, some of them have studied how water and microbes interact with each other, and then organizing the drilling vessel that to go out and do all the sampling and measurements next year.

Zehra
We wondered if there’s anything about his field that may not be visible to others that he wishes they knew more about.

Brandon
I think one is, you know, we live in an era where we have access to so many different fields. And so, I think one thing that’s exciting is, or that I’d like people to know, is to become a scientist, you know, we’re not creating things from scratch anymore. We’re not Newton, we’re not Einstein. And so, it’s really working with scientists across fields where we learn the most.

And so, something that I think is exciting to me is, the geochemistry tells me a lot about these groundwater systems, how old they are, where they were sourced, but I’m not a geochemist. So how do I learn about this? I don’t go learn geochemistry. I go partner with the geochemist. I think one thing about science is that it’s hugely collaborative. And we all have our specialties and our expertise, but we learn the most when we work together across fields. So oftentimes, I talk to students, and they say, well, I want to be a geoscientist, because I want to do this, or I want to be a mechanical engineer, and I may do this. And I, I try to encourage the students to think about how they’re going to talk to people in other disciplines, because that’s where they’re going to be active in the modern world. You know, we don’t just have one job anymore, we’re working across fields. So that’s one way that I thought about that that’s interesting.

The other one is just the excitement of exploration. So, I’m studying these freshwater systems that exist beneath the ocean where you wouldn’t expect to find freshwater. And the reason we know they are there is because somebody accidentally found them looking for something else. Sometimes what we learn in one project can lead to 10, 15, 20 years of other projects. So just because something doesn’t match your original hypothesis, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t pursue it farther, or think about it. We can learn from, I don’t want to say our mistakes, but we can learn from unexpected results. And that’s something that is what really motivates me is I want to know and answer the question, a question about how old the freshwater is. And when I do that, I’ll find something about how it affects microbes, and then I’ll get to learn something about microbes. And so, these studies feed into one to another. And so even where I think I’ve made a misstep, we probably still made an advancement.

Zehra
Are there any unrealized projects, something that has been on the back of Dr. Dugan’s mind, perhaps a project that has not materialized yet because of timing not being right yet?

Brandon
Just a few minutes ago, I mentioned the primary project is this water project that we’re working on, but sort of in the background, we do have this other project going on where we’re looking at the role of charcoal in the hydrologic cycle. So, charcoal that’s produced unintentionally, so from forest fires, here in the Mountain West, where I live now. When there’s a big forest fire, the ground changes quite a bit. And that affects how rainfall interacts with the soil, it affects how things grow back. Other people have looked at this sort of intentionally making charcoal and putting it in fields to increase crop fertility and yield rates and things like that. And as a place to store carbon in the in the ground rather than emitting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And a couple of colleagues in Mine have been toying with these ideas of different ways to track how the carbon moves through the cycle and over what timescales. So, the underlying assumption here is that we put this carbon in the ground, and it stays there as charcoal. But empirically, we know it disappears, either through chemical degradation or physical degradation, or runoff and things like that. And so, we’re trying to understand the processes with some mathematics. But we’re also trying to use some physics to figure out how we can track it during time, so people actually know where it goes when it’s moving. So, we can keep an inventory of a new carbon storehouse.

The timing hasn’t been right for different funding calls. We’ve put in some projects to net federal funding agencies and gotten some money to study it. We’ve had some industry sponsor interest, but every time we’re just about ready to get sponsored with an industry partner, they reshuffle or change or something like that. And they say, Oh, not this year, but maybe next year. And so, it’s something that we keep sort of incrementally doing a little bit of work, kind of on shoestring budget in the background waiting for the right, right time. But it’s a way to sort of maximize how much plant growth you get how much carbon you store in the ground without using fertilizers and things like that. And again, it’s another project that sort of started from an accident in Brazil. This just happened natural. There were natural fires and then there were these very fertile soils and people are like Oh, this is interesting. Can we do it intentionally? And we can do it intentionally but we’re not as good as nature, which is sort of interesting that we can’t quite figure out how nature did it so well.

Zehra
It seems there is freedom in science to create and develop projects, and for exploring funding opportunities. Whereas in the arts, projects may develop in various directions with a different sort of freedom. We wondered if the established scientific methods are what keeps scientific explorations moving forward.

Brandon
I would say, I would actually kind of flip it on the other side and I’d say we don’t give scientists enough freedom. So, if you look at a curriculum for an undergraduate in a science field, or an engineering field, it’s very rigorous. Like, probably 100 or so of the 125 credits that they have to take are totally prescribed, and they have to take them in this order, and this order, and this order, and this order and this order, because there are methods. You have to learn differential calculus before you can learn the integral calculus, and you know, there’s a sequence that things have to go. But then we get to this problem that I was mentioning earlier, or my version of a problem, where people get really focused on the answer, because everything’s just been way too structured. And then when you start to get to upper undergraduate level, or graduate levels type, then you have this opportunity to be more creative and presenting things because you’re working on more open-ended problems. Maybe it’s research, maybe it’s a new project for an employer or something like that, you have to think outside the box. How am I going to do this study? How am I going to present these results, and I want to present them this way, whether it be a PowerPoint presentation, or a journal presentation, you have to think about how you lay things out. And many of our STEM students aren’t getting this until their fourth year of college or their graduate education. And so, we end up with these, sort of very, I don’t want to say, sort of uninspiring presentations, where they’re just very, like I did this, and then I did this, and then I did this, and then I did this, and then I did this. And that’s true. That’s exactly what they did. And so oftentimes, I’m telling students, well, you don’t have to tell them exactly the order you did them in, tell them the story of what you learned. And so, it’s sort of breaking this mold of A, B, C, D and E. And it’s, you know, you might want to tell them A, J, C, Q, because it tells a better story if you do it that way. And so, I think we’ve probably confined our STEM students too much to follow a method and sort of, we’re teaching them sort of creativity and exploration later, which is a little bit ironic, because probably most science started with exploration and trying to understand something, and then we kind of close that down and then open it back up later in their careers.

The other thing that we’re doing a lot more of in education at college level, but I think also at the high school level that’s helping our students is more open-ended questions. So rather than just a calculus problem that has an answer, sort of a question that has multiple answers, and it is sort of how you think to get there. So, students get comfort with uncertainty, because once they get a job, they’re gonna be dealing with uncertainty every day. I guess, you know, pure artists side, they get focused the same way we get focused, but for different reasons. My brother’s a graphic designer, he’s always what’s the next contract? It’s a very different routine for him because he’s a subcontractor. So, it’s one company to another company, he’s always jumping around and has to be very versatile and adaptable. And many of us in STEM fields, you know, we kind of get in our rut, and we can sit there. And so, we probably do better on both sides and sort of giving a little more structure to the traditional artists, let’s say and a little less structure and more freedom to the science, engineering students.

Zehra
Dr. Dugan has a cool style of talking about his projects. Listen to how he developed his communication skills, which started first with his interest in reading.

Brandon
I did read a lot. I still read a lot. It kind of goes in cycles, but I’ll read historical novels for a while, autobiographies for a while, and then you know, popcorn fiction for a while so it’s kind of all over the board. I read many different things. I also think a lot of it just came from my training as a PhD student. My advisor really focused on communication and making sure that you can explain things to any audience. So, I often, you know, reflect who is my audience? And how can I say things?

I have one committee member when I was a PhD student at Penn State, who told me that, I should be able to use the same slide deck and present it to a group of kindergarteners and they should be able to enjoy it, depending on how I present it. And I should be able to show the same slides to a bunch of PhDs in my field and explain it differently and they should enjoy it. And I should be able to show it to, you know, people who didn’t go to university and are practicing professionals or something like that. And they can see the same images, but how I describe them. And so, they all learn the same thing, but from different words. And so, I’ve just always sort of practice telling my story. And now I’ve been doing this for quite a few years. So, it gets better. I learn every year I every time I give a talk or a presentation or an interview. I reflect on it, what could I have done better? How can I improve? How can I be more effective with my science now? I know what I can do technically and so now I focus a lot more on communication and how can I communicate it better.

Zehra
I believe a nice remark that Doctor Dougan mentioned is how multidisciplinary work can be intellectually beneficial because it can help explore the same topic from different viewpoints while finding new approaches that could possibly lead to advancements of the same project.

[music]

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